W A L D E N 



'i 



BY 



HENRY D. THOREAU 

Author or "A Week on the Concord," "The 
Maine Woods," "Cape Cod," etc. 



ILLUSTRATED BY 

CLIFTON JOHNSON 




NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



,A * 



Copyright, 1910 
By Thomas Y. Crowell & Company 

Published, September 1910 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, IT. S. A. 



©CLA268876 



INTRODUCTION 

CONCORD, Thoreau's birthplace, and his 
life-long place of residence, except for a 
few short periods, is an inland town 
about twenty miles from Boston. The town is 
in the center of a large tract which first drew 
settlers to it because of its great meadows on the 
Musketaquid River. Back from the stream are 
sandy or rocky uplands, covered for the most 
part, as they always have been, with woods of 
oak, pine, chestnut and maple. The people 
are chiefly farmers, but a considerable number 
of mechanics, merchants and professional men 
dwell in the village. As a whole the region is 
one of quiet serenity, favorable to leisurely 
thought and rambling, and also to that persist- 
ent industry by which New England thrives. 

In Thoreau's time Concord was a somewhat 
smaller place than now, and naturally was 
rather more rustic. The population was about 
two thousand, the mode of life plain and un- 
ostentatious, and the people generally thrifty, 
few having wealth, but, on the other hand, few 
being pinched by poverty. The farm houses 
were usually of the ample and substantial type 
that bespoke antiquity and hospitality. These 



vi INTRODUCTION 

ancient homesteads always appealed to Thoreau, 
and when a dwelling was abandoned and went 
to ruin, his interest continued in the neglected 
orchard and dooryard and other features of the 
former homestead that attested human contact 
and care. This interest in mankind's relation 
to the soil, the waters and the woodlands is 
constantly manifest in his books, and he deals 
as much with human nature as with that of 
forest and field. 

It was in March, 1845, that he borrowed an 
axe of his friend, Mr. Alcott, and went to the 
woods to begin preparations for building the 
hut in which he afterward lived more than two 
years beside Walden Pond, about a mile south 
of Concord village. He had long meditated 
making such an experiment. The laborious 
routine and the conventionalities of ordinary 
civilized life were a burden to him. He rebelled 
against the necessity of expending so much time 
and energy in the mere struggle for food and 
shelter — it left him too little leisure to be wise, 
and too little impulse to carry on his mental 
and spiritual growth. At Walden he proposed 
to learn how small were the actual needs of the 
body, and what the essential cost of living. He 
would test the pleasures and possible draw- 
backs of the plainest fare and a primitively 
simple dwelling. He coveted, too, the oppor- 
tunity that would be afforded to study Nature 



INTRODUCTION vii 

while living in closer contact with the out-of- 
door world than he could in the village, and he 
wanted to have solitude for undisturbed medi- 
tation and authorship. 

He was of course visited at his woodland 
retreat by his old acquaintances, and among 
these was Mr. Alcott, who, after returning from 
spending an evening at the hermitage, made 
this entry in his diary : *'If I were to proffer my 
earnest prayer to the gods for the greatest of all 
human privileges it should be for the gift of a 
severely candid friend. Most are lovers of pres- 
ent reputation, and not of that exaltation of soul 
which friends and discourse were given to awaken 
and cherish in us. Intercourse of this kind I 
have found possible with my friends Emerson 
and Thoreau; and the evenings passed in their 
society realize my conception of what friend- 
ship owes to and takes from its objects." 

Thoreau was a squatter at Walden on the 
property of Mr. Emerson, who, for the sake of 
his walks and his winter fire, had bought land 
on both sides of Walden Pond. Emerson was 
evidently interested and attracted to a marked 
degree by his friend's woodland life; for we 
find Thoreau, at the end of his first year's 
pondside residence, designing a lodge which 
Emerson proposed should occupy a ledge on 
the opposite shore where it would command a 
wide prospect westerly over the level country 



viii INTRODUCTION 

toward Monadnock and Wachusett. It was to 
be a retreat for study and writing, but it was 
never built. Instead, a rustic summer house 
was erected in Mr. Emerson's garden. The 
three friends, Alcott, Emerson and Thoreau, 
were intending to join in this task, and they 
went to the woods together to cut the trees 
needed for the purpose. Mr. Emerson, how- 
ever, wielded the axe only one day. He found 
his strength and skill unequal to that of his 
companions, and withdrew. When the work of 
actually building the summer house was begun 
Thoreau also withdrew, he was so averse to the 
way in which Mr. Alcott went ahead putting 
up and tearing down with no settled design on 
paper. 

It is by his two years' encampment in the 
Walden woods that Thoreau is best known to 
the world; for so unusual a proceeding on the 
part of a man of his education and cultured 
tastes could not help attracting much curious 
interest. The book which relates how he lived 
and what he saw during this period has been 
the most popular of his writings, and will prob- 
ably continue to be. In none of his books is 
his genius displayed so characteristically and 
completely. It was, however, not published un- 
til seven years after his experiment as a hermit 
ended. Like all his books, it contains much 
that is not in the least concerned with what is 



INTRODUCTION ix 

primarily the subject of the volume. But it 
does charmingly describe the scenes and events 
of his sylvan days and nights with nature, and 
it has made Walden the most romantically 
attractive region of Concord. Anciently, how- 
ever, that neighborhood was a district of dark 
repute, the dwelling-place of ne'er-do-well and 
lawless characters such as used to fringe many 
a sober New England village. A large propor- 
tion of the humble houses were those of negroes. 
Why Thoreau should establish himself in 
so forlorn a vicinity was a puzzle to most of his 
fellow-townsmen. Indeed, not a few of his 
readers in the years that have passed since, 
contemplating the long period he lived in that 
lonely woodland shanty, have been led to de- 
clare that he was a barbarian or a misanthrope. 
But the environment suited his mood at the 
time and gave him the chance to write and 
meditate free from many of the distractions of 
ordinary life. He was not, however, by any 
means cut off from his accustomed world; for, 
though often in his hut for days together, he 
also was frequently at the family home in the 
village. Such intimacy as he had with friends 
and acquaintances was likewise continued, and 
he was as social as he ever had been. He lived 
a life of labor and study in his forest retreat, and 
as soon as he exhausted the advantages of that 
solitude he abandoned it. 



X INTRODUCTION 

The experience was never regretted, and he 
seems to have found his Walden life in many 
respects ideal ; yet he was not inclined to insist 
that others should adopt a similar life because, 
as he explains, unless a person has *'a pretty 
good supply of internal sunshine he would have, 
I judge, to spend too much of his time in fight- 
ing with his dark humors." 

Thoreau's hut became the property of a 
Scotch gardener, who removed it a short dis- 
tance to the author's beanfield, and made it 
his cottage for a few years. Then a farmer 
bought it, put it on wheels, and carried it 
to his farm, three miles north, where it stood 
for many years, a shelter for corn and beans, 
and a favorite haunt of squirrels and blue 

jays. 

On the spot where the cabin stood in the 
woods is now a cairn of stones, yearly visited 
by hundreds, and gradually growing; for each 
visitor is supposed to honor the poet-naturalist's 
memory by bringing a stone from the borders 
of the near lake and adding it to the pile. The 
land roundabout still continues in the Emerson 
family, and its pine-clad slopes are freely open 
to the public. I fancy the aspect of the vicinity 
has not changed essentially. The woodland 
seclusion is almost as complete as it was in 
Thoreau's time. Even the railroad which 
skirts one end of the pond was there when he 



INTRODUCTION xi 

had his hut beside the little cove that indents 
the shore a quarter mile away. Few spots are 
more satisfying to the literary pilgrim, and it 
is no wonder that the stream of visitors should 
be so constant and numerous year after year. 

CLIFTON JOHNSON. 
Hadley, Mass. 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I. Economy 1 

II. Where I Lived, and what I Lived for . . . 105 

III. Reading 130 

IV. Sounds 146 

V. Solitude 170 

VI. Visitors 184 

VII. The Beanfield 204 

VIII. The Village . , 221 

IX. The Ponds 230 

X. Baker F^RM , . . , 267 

XI. Higher Laws . . . , , 278 

XII. Brute Nejl<}hbors . , , , , 296 

XIII. House-Warming 316 

XIV. Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors 339 
XV. Winter Animals 359 

XVI. The Pond in Wintbs 374 

XVII. Spring 395 

XVIII. Conclusion 422 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Walden Pond Frontispiece^ 

OPPOSITE PAGE 

TiiOREAu's Cove, just below his Dwelling .... 2^ 

Placid Waters 26 ^ 

The Site of Thoreau's House in March 52 ^ 

One of the Pitch Pines by the Shore of Walden 64 ^" 

Concord's Most Famous Public Building, the Uni- 
tarian Church 74i^ 

A Glimpse of Walden , 92 ^ 

Concord Battle Ground 112 

Where Thoreau's Cabin Stood 134 

The Railroad at the East End of the Pond . . 152 

Emerson's Home, where Thoreau was a Frequent 

Visitor 104 

The Cartpath near Thoreau's Hut 176 

Children in the Woods by the Pond 200 

Concord — The Business Centre 212 

A Winter Road near Thoreau's Cabin , 224 

In the Woods near Fair-Haven Hill 230 

The Concord River in Winter 236 

The Stony Shore 242 "^ 

Flint's Pond 256 



xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

OPPOSITE PAGE 

White Pond 262 

The Swampy Lowland 268 

The Baker Farm 272 

Fair-Haven Pond 276 

Brister's Spring • • ^02 

River Meadows 316 

Brister's Hill and the Walden Highway .... 342 

The Icy Trees. . . \ . '. 352 

Goose Pond in Winter 360 

The Icebound Pond 374 

Walden Pond on a Winter Morning 380 

Among the Pines bordering the Pond 392 

The River near Nine Acre Corner 418 

The Concord House in which Thoreau Died . . 434 



WALDEN 



I 

ECONOMY 

WHEN I wrote the following pages, or 
rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, 
in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, 
in a house which I had built myself, on the shore 
of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, 
and earned my living by the labor of my hands 
only. I lived there two years and two months. 
At present I am a sojourner in civilized life 
again. 

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on 
the notice of my readers if very particular in- 
quiries had not been made by my townsmen 
concerning my mode of life, which some would 
call impertinent, though they do not appear to 
me at all impertinent, but, considering the cir- 
cumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some 
have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel 
lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. 
Others have been curious to learn what portion 
of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; 
and some, who have large families, how many 
poor children I maintained. I will therefore 
ask those of my readers who feel no particular 



2 WALDEN 

interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to 
answer some of these questions in this book. 
In most books, the /, or first person, is omitted ; 
in this it will be retained; that, in respect to 
egotism, is the main difference. We com- 
monly do not remember that it is, after all, 
always the first person that is speaking. I 
should not talk so much about myself if there 
were anybody else whom I knew as well. Un- 
fortunately, I am confined to this theme by the 
narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, 
on my side, require of every writer, first or last, 
a simple and sincere account of his own life, 
and not merely what he has heard of other 
men's lives; some such account as he would 
send to his kindred from a distant land; for if 
he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a 
distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are 
more particularly addressed to poor students. 
As for the rest of my readers, they will accept 
such portions as apply to them. I trust that 
none will stretch the seams in putting on the 
coat, for it may do good service to him whom it 
fits. \ 

I would fain say something, not so much con- 
cerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders, 
as you who read these pages, who are said to 
live in New England; something, about your 
condition, especially your outward condition or 
circumstances in this world, in this town, what 




Thor can's Cove ^ just below his dwelling 



ECONOMY 3 

it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as 
it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as 
not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; 
and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, 
the inhabitants have appeared to me to be 
doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. 
What I have heard of Brahmins sitting exposed 
to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; 
or hanging suspended, with their heads down- 
ward, over flames; or looking at the heavens 
over their shoulders "until it becomes impos- 
sible for them to resume their natural position, 
while from the twist of the neck nothing but 
liquids can pass into the stomach;" or dwell- 
ing, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or 
measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, 
the breadth of vast empires ; or standing on one 
leg on the tops of pillars, — even these forms 
of conscious penance are hardly more incredible 
and astonishing than the scenes which I daily 
witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were 
trifling in comparison with those which my 
neighbors have undertaken; for they were 
only twelve, and had an end ; but I could never 
see that these men slew or captured any monster 
or finished any labor. They have no friend 
lolas to burn with a hot iron the root of the 
hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, 
two spring up. 

I see young men, my townsmen, whose mis- 



4 WALDEN 

fortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, 
barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are 
more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if 
they had been born in the open pasture and 
suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen 
with clearer eyes what field they were called to 
labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil ? 
Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man 
is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt ? Why 
should they begin digging their graves as soon 
as they are born ? They have got to live a man's 
life, pushing all these things before them, and 
get on as well as they can. How many a poor 
immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and 
smothered under its load, creeping down the 
road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy- 
five feet by forty, its Augean stables never 
cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, 
mowing, pasture, and wood-lot ! The portion- 
less, who struggle with no such unnecessary 
inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough 
to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. 
But men labor under a mistake. The better 
part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil 
for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly 
called necessity, they are employed, as it says in 
an old book, laying up treasures which moth 
and rust will corrupt and thieves break through 
and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when 
they get to the end of it, if not before. It is 



ECONOMY 5 

said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by 
throwing stones over their heads behind them : — 

Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum, 
Et documenta, damus qua simus origine nati. 

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, — 

"From thence our kind-hearted is, enduring pain and care. 
Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are." 

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering 
oracle, throwing the stones over their heads 
behind them, not seeing where they fell. 

/Most men, even in this comparatively free 
country, through mere ignorance and mistake, 
are so occupied with the factitious cares and 
superfluously coarse labors of life, that its finer 
fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, 
from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble 
too much for that. Actually, the laboring man 
has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; 
he cannot afford to sustain the manliest rela- 
tions to men; his labor would be depreciated 
in the market. He has no time to be anything 
but a machine. How can he remember well 
his ignorance — which his growth requires — 
who has so often to use his knowledge ? We 
should feed and clothe him gratuitously some- 
times, and recruit him with our cordials, before 
we judge of him. The finest qualities of our 
nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be pre- 



6 WALDEN 

served only by the most delicate handling. Yet 
we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus 
tenderly.-^ 
\ Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it 
hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping 
for breath. I have no doubt that some of you 
who read this book are unable to pay for all the 
dinners which you have actually eaten, or for 
the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are 
already worn out, and have come to this page to 
spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your 
creditors of an hour. It is very evident what 
mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for 
my sight has been whetted by experience; al- 
ways on the limits, trying to get into business 
and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient 
slough, called by the Latins ces alienum, an- 
other's brass, for some of their coins were made 
of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by 
this other's brass; always promising to pay, 
promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, 
insolvent ; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, 
by how many modes, only not state-prison of- 
fences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting 
yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating 
into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous gen- 
erosity, that you may persuade your neighbor 
to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his 
coat, or his carriage, or import his grocer- 
ies for him; making yourselves sick, that you 



V 



ECONOMY 7 

may lay up something against a sick day, some- 
thing to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a 
stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, 
in a brick bank; no matter where, no matter 
how much or how little. 

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivo- 
lous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross 
but somewhat foreign form of servitude called 
Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and 
subtle masters that enslave both north and 
south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; 
it is worse to have a northern one; but worst 
of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. 
Talk of a divinity in man ! Look at the teamster 
on the highway, wending to market by day or 
night ; does any divinity stir within him ? His 
highest duty to fodder and water his horses ! 
What is his destiny to him compared with the 
shipping interests ? Does not he drive for Squire 
Make-a-stir ? How godlike, how immortal, is 
he ? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely 
all the day he fears, not being immortal nor 
divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own 
opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. 
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with 
our own private opinion. What a man thinks 
of himself, that it is which determines, or rather 
indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in 
the West Indian provinces of the fancy and 
imagination, — what Wilberforce is there to 



8 WALDEN 

bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of 
the land weaving toilet cushions against the last 
day, not to betray too green an interest in their 
fates ! As if you could kill time without injur- 
ing eternity. 

\ The mass of men lead lives of quiet desper- 
ation. What is called resignation is confirmed 
desperation. From the desperate city you go 
into the desperate country, and have to console 
yourself with the bravery of minks and musk- 
rats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is 
concealed even under what are called the games 
and amusements of mankind. There is no play 
in them, for this comes after work. But it is 
a characteristic of wisdom hot to do desperate 
things. 

When we consider what, to use the words of 
the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what 
are the true necessaries and means of life, it 
appears as if men had deliberately chosen the 
common mode of living because they preferred 
it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is 
no choice left. But alert and healthy natures 
remember that the sun rose clear. It is never 
too late to give up our prejudices. No way of 
thinking or doing, however ancient, can be 
trusted without proof. What everybody echoes 
or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn 
out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of 
opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that 



ECONOMY 9 

would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. 
What old people say you cannot do you try and 
find that you can. Old deeds for old people, 
and new deeds for new. Old people did not 
know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh 
fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a 
little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled 
round the globe with the speed of birds, in a 
way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is 
no better, hardly so well, qualified for an in- 
structor as youth, for it has not profited so much 
as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the 
wisest man has learned anything of absolute 
value by living. Practically, the old have no 
very important advice to give the young, their 
own experience has been so partial, and their 
lives have been such miserable failures, for 
private reasons, as they must believe; and it 
may be that they have some faith left which 
belies that experience, and they are only less 
young than they were. I have lived some thirty 
years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the 
first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice 
from my seniors. They have told me nothing, 
and probably cannot tell me anything, to the 
purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great 
extent untried by me; but it does not avail me 
that they have tried it. If I have any experience 
which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that 
this my Mentors said nothing about. 



10 WALDEN 

One farmer says to me, ''You cannot live on 
vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing 
to make bones with;" and so he religiously 
devotes a part of his day to supplying his sys- 
tem with the raw material of bones, walking 
all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, 
with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his 
lumbering plough along in spite of every ob- 
stacle. Some things are really necessaries of 
life in some circles, the most helpless and dis- 
eased, which in others are luxuries merely, and 
in others still are entirely unknown. 

The whole ground of human life seems to 
some to have been gone over by their predeces- 
sors, both the heights and the valleys, and all 
things to have been cared for. According to 
Evelyn, "the wise Solomon prescribed ordi- 
nances for the very distances of trees; and the 
Roman praetors have decided how often you 
may go into your neighbor's land to gather the 
acorns which fall on it without trespass, and 
what share belongs to that neighbor." Hippoc- 
rates has even left directions how we should 
cut our nails ; that is, even with the ends of the 
fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubt- 
edly the very tedium and ennui which presume 
to have exhausted the variety and the joys of 
life are as old as Adam. But man's capacities 
have never been measured ; nor are we to judge 
of what he can do by any precedents, so little 



ECONOMY 11 

has been tried. Whatever have been thy fail- 
ures hitherto, **be not afflicted, my child, for 
who shall assign to thee what thou hast left 
undone?" 

We might try our lives by a thousand simple 
tests; as, for instance, that the same sun which 
ripens my beans illumines at once a system of 
earths like ours. If I had remembered this it 
would have prevented some mistakes. This 
was not the light in which I hoed them. The 
stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles ! 
What distant and different beings in the various 
mansions of the universe are contemplating the 
same one at the same moment ! Nature and 
human life are as various as our several consti- 
tutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers 
to another ? Could a greater miracle take place 
than for us to look through each other's eyes 
for an instant.^ We should live in all the ages 
of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds 
of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology ! — I 
know of no reading of another's experience so 
startling and informing as this would be. 

The greater part of what my neighbors call 
good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I 
repent of anything, it is very likely to be my 
good behavior. What demon possessed me that 
I behaved so well.? You may say the wisest 
thing you can, old man, — you who have lived 
seventy years, not without honor of a kind, — • 



U WALDEN 

I hear an irresistible voice which invites me 
away from all that. One generation abandons 
the enterprises of another like stranded vessels. 
I think that we may safely trust a good deal 
more than we do. We may waive just so much 
care of ourselves as we honestly bestow else- 
where. Nature is as well adapted to our weak- 
ness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety 
and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form 
of disease. We are made to exaggerate the im- 
portance of what work we do; and yet how 
much is not done by us ! or, what if we had 
been taken sick ? How vigilant we are ! deter- 
mined not to live by faith if we can avoid it ; all 
the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly 
say our prayers and commit ourselves to un- 
certainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we 
compelled to live, reverencing our life, and deny- 
ing the possibility of change. This is the only 
way, we say; but there are as many ways as 
there can be drawn radii from one centre. All 
change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a 
miracle which is taking place every instant. 
Confucius said, "To know that we know what 
we know, and that we do not know what we do 
not know, that is true knowledge." When one 
man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be 
a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men 
will at length establish their lives on that basis. 



ECONOMY 13 

Let us consider for a moment what most of 
the trouble and anxiety which I have referred to 
is about, and how much it is necessary that we 
be troubled, or, at least, careful. It would be 
some advantage to live a primitive and frontier 
life, though in the midst of an outward civiliza- 
tion, if only to learn what are the gross neces- 
saries of life and what methods have been taken 
to obtain them; or even to look over the old 
day-books of the merchants, to see what it was 
that men most commonly bought at the stores, 
what they stored, that is, what are the grossest 
groceries. For the improvements of ages have 
had but little influence on the essential laws of 
man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, 
are not to be distinguished from those of our 
ancestors. 

By the words, necessary of life, I mean what- 
ever, of all that man obtains by his own exer- 
tions, has been from the first, or from long use 
has become, so important to human life that 
few, if any, whether from savageness, or pov- 
erty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without 
it. To many creatures there is in this sense but 
one necessary of life, Food. To the bison of 
the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, 
with water to drink ; unless he seeks the Shelter 
of the forest or the mountain's shadow. None 
of the brute creation requires more than Food 
and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in 



14 WALDEN 

this climate may, accurately enough, be dis- 
tributed under the several heads of Food, Shel- 
ter, Clothing, and Fuel ; for not till we have 
secured these are we prepared to entertain the 
true problems of life with freedom and a pros- 
pect of success. Man has invented, not only 
houses, but clothes and cooked food; and 
possibly from the accidental discovery of the 
warmth of fire, and the consequent use of it, at 
first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit 
by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the 
same second nature. By proper Shelter and 
Clothing we legitimately retain our own inter- 
nal heat ; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, 
that is, with an external heat greater than our 
own internal, may not cookery properly be said 
to begin ? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the 
inhabitants of Terra del Fuego that, while his 
own party, who were well clothed and sitting 
close to a fire, were far from too warm, these 
naked savages, who were farther off, were ob- 
served, to his great surprise, "to be streaming 
with perspiration at undergoing such a roast- 
ing." So, we are told, the New Hollander goes 
naked with impunity, while the European shiv- 
ers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine 
the hardiness of these savages with the intel- 
lectualness of the civilized man ? According to 
Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel 
which keeps up the internal combustion in the 



ECONOMY 15 

lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm 
less. The animal heat is the result of a slow 
combustion, and disease and death take place 
when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or 
from some defect in the draught, the fire goes 
out. Of course the vital heat is not to be con- 
founded with fire ; but so much for analogy. It 
appears, therefore, from the above list, that the 
expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous 
with the expression, animal heat; for while 
Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps 
up the fire within us, — and Fuel serves only to 
prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of 
our bodies by addition from without, — Shelter 
and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat 
I thus generated and absorbed, 
sj The grand necessity, then, for our bodies is to 
keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What 
pains we accordingly take, not only with our 
Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our 
beds, which are our night-clothes, robbing the 
nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter 
within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass 
and leaves at the end of its burrow ! The poor 
man is wont to complain that this is a cold world ; 
and to cold, no less physical than social, we re- 
fer directly a great part of our ails. The sum- 
mer, in some climates, makes possible to man a 
sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his 
Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire. 



16 WALDEN 

and many of the fruits are sulBSciently cooked by 
its rays; while Food generally is more various, 
and more easily obtained, and Clothing and 
Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary. At the 
present day, and in this country, as I find my 
own experience, a few implements, a knife, an 
axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, &c., and for the 
studious, lamplight, stationery, and access to a 
few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all 
be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not 
wise, go to the other side of the globe, to bar- 
barous and unhealthy regions, and devote them- 
selves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order 
that they may live, — that is, keep comfortably 
warm, — and die in New England at last. The 
luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfort- 
ably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied 
before, they are cooked, of course a la mode. 

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so- 
called comforts, of life are not only not indis- 
pensable, but positive hindrances to the eleva- 
tion of mankind. With respect to luxuries and 
comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more 
simple and meagre life than the poor. The 
ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, 
and Greek, were a class than which none has 
been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in 
inward. We know not much about them. It is 
remarkable that we know so much of them as 
we do. The same is true oi^ the more modern 



ECONOMY 17 

reformers and benefactors of their race. None 
can be an impartial or wise observer of human 
life but from the vantage ground of what we 
should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of lux- 
ury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, 
or commerce, or literature, or art. There are 
nowadays professors of philosophy, but not 
philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess be- 
cause it was once admirable to live. To be a 
philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, 
nor even to found a school, but so to love wis- 
dom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of 
simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and 
trust. It is to solve some of the problems of 
life, not only theoretically, but practically. The 
success of great scholars and thinkers is com- 
monly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not 
manly. They make shift to live merely by con- 
formity, practically as their fathers did, and are 
in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of 
men. But why do men degenerate ever ? What 
makes families run out ? What is the nature of 
the luxury which enervates and destroys na- 
tions ? Are we sure that there is none of it in 
our own lives ? The philosopher is in advance 
of his age even in the outward form of his life. 
He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like 
his contemporaries. How can a man be a phil- 
osopher and not maintain his vital heat by bet- 
ter methods than other men ? 



18 WALDEN 

When a man is warmed by the several modes 
which I have described, what does he want 
next ? Surely not more warmth of the same 
kind, as more and richer food, larger and more 
splendid houses, finer and more abundant cloth- 
ing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, 
and the like. When he has obtained those 
things which are necessary to life, there is an- 
other alternative than to obtain the superflu- 
ities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his 
vacation from humbler toil having commenced. 
The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it 
has sent its radicle downward, and it may now 
send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why 
has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, 
but that he may rise in the same proportion into 
the heavens above ? — for the nobler plants are 
valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air 
and light, far from the ground, and are not 
treated like the humbler esculents, which, though 
they may be biennials, are cultivated only till 
they have perfected their root, and often cut 
down at top for this purpose, so that most would 
not know them in their flowering season. 

I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and 
valiant natures, who will mind their own affairs 
whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build 
more magnificently and spend more lavishly 
than the richest, without ever impoverishing 
themselves, not knowing how they live, — if. 



ECONOMY 19 

indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed ; 
nor to those who find their encouragement and 
inspiration in precisely the present condition of 
things, and cherish it with the fondness and 
enthusiasm of lovers, — and, to some extent, I 
reckon myself in this number; I do not speak 
to those who are well employed, in whatever 
circumstances, and they know whether they are 
well employed or not ; — but mainly to the mass 
of men who are discontented, and idly com- 
plaining of the hardness of their lot or of the 
times, when they might improve them. There 
are some who complain most energetically and 
inconsolably of any, because they are, as they 
say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind 
that seemingly wealthy but most terribly im- 
poverished class of all, who have accumulated 
dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of 
it, and thus have forged their own golden or 
silver fetters. 

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired 
to spend my life in years past, it would prob- 
ably surprise those of my readers who are some- 
what acquainted with its actual history ; it would 
certainly astonish those who know nothing about 
it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises 
which I have cherished. 

In any weather, at any hour of the day or 
night, I have been anxious to improve the nick 



20 WALDEN 

of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand 
on the meeting of two eternities, the past and 
future, which is precisely the present moment; 
to toe that line. You will pardon some ob- 
scurities, for there are more secrets in my trade 
than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, 
but inseparable from its very nature. I would 
gladly tell all that I know about it, and never 
paint "No Admittance" on my gate. 

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a 
turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many 
are the travellers I have spoken concerning 
them, describing their tracks and what calls they 
answered to. I have met one or two who had 
heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, 
and even seen the dove disappear behind a 
cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover 
them as if they had lost them themselves. 

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn 
merely, but, if possible, Nature herself ! How 
many mornings, summer and winter, before yet 
any neighbor was stirring about his business, 
have I been about mine ! No doubt, many of 
my townsmen have met me returning from this 
enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the 
twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. 
It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in 
his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last im- 
portance only to be present at it. 

So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent 



ECONOMY 21 

outside the town, trying to hear what was in the 
wind, to hear and carry it express ! I well-nigh 
sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath 
into the bargain, running in the face of it. If it 
had concerned either of the political parties, 
depend upon it, it would have appeared in the 
Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other 
times watching from the observatory of some 
cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival; or 
waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky 
to fall, that I might catch something, though I 
never caught much, and that, manna-wise, 
would dissolve again in the sun. 

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, 
of no very wide circulation, whose editor has 
never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contri- 
butions, and, as is too common with writers, 
I got only my labor for my pains. However, in 
this case my pains were their own reward. 

For many years I was self-appointed inspector 
of snow storms and rain storms, and did my 
duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, 
then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, 
keeping them open, and ravines bridged and 
passable at all seasons, where the pubUc heel 
had testified to their utility. 

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, 
which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of 
trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an 
eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of 



^2 WALDEN 

the farm ; though I did not always know whether 
Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field 
to-day; that was none of my business. I have 
watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry 
and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black 
ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which 
might have withered else in dry seasons. 

In short, I went on thus for a long time, I may 
say it without boasting, faithfully minding my 
business, till it became more and more evident 
that my townsmen would not after all admit me 
into the list of town officers, nor make my place 
a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My 
accounts, which I can swear to have kept faith- 
fully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still 
less accepted, still less paid and settled. How- 
ever, I have not set my heart on that. 

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell 
baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer 
in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to buy 
any baskets .^ " he asked. *' No, we do not want 
any," was the reply. 

*'What!" exclaimed the Indian, as he went 
out the gate, *'do you mean to starve us.'^" 
Having seen his industrious white neighbors so 
well off, — that the lawyer had only to weave 
arguments, and by some magic wealth and 
standing followed, he had said to himself: I 
will go into business; I will weave baskets; it 
is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when 



ECONOMY 23 

he had made the baskets he would have done 
his part, and then it would be the white man's 
to buy them. He had not discovered that it was 
necessary for him to make it worth the other's 
while to buy them, or at least make him think 
that it was so, or to make something else which 
it would be worth his while to buy. I too had 
woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but 
I had not made it worth any one's while to buy 
them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think 
it worth my while to weave them, and instead 
of studying how to make it worth men's while 
to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid 
the necessity of selling them. The life which 
men praise and regard as successful is but one 
kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind 
at the expense of the others.^ 

Finding that my fellow-citizens were not 
likely to offer me any room in the court house, 
or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I 
must shift for myself, I turned my face more 
exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was 
better known. I determined to go into busi- 
ness at once, and not wait to acquire the usual 
capital, using such slender means as I had 
already got. My purpose in going to Walden 
Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly 
there, but to transact some private business 
with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from 
accomplishing which for want of a little common 



24 WALDEN 

sense, a little enterprise and business talent, 
appeared not so sad as foolish. 

I have always endeavored to acquire strict 
business habits; they are indispensable to every 
man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, 
then some small counting house on the coast, 
in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough. 
You will export such articles as the country 
affords, purely native products, much ice and 
pine timber and a little granite, always in native 
bottoms. These will be good ventures. To 
oversee all the details yourself in person; to 
be at once pilot and captain, and owner and 
underwriter; to buy and sell and keep the 
accounts; to read every letter received, and 
write or read every letter sent; to superintend 
the discharge of imports night and day; to be 
upon many parts of the coast almost at the 
same time; — often the richest freight will 
be discharged upon a Jersey shore ; — to be 
your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the 
horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound 
coastwise ; to keep up a steady despatch of com- 
modities, for the supply of such a distant and 
exorbitant market; to keep yourself informed 
of the state of the markets, prospects of war 
and peace everywhere, and anticipate the ten- 
dencies of trade and civilization, — taking ad- 
vantage of the results of all exploring expeditions, 
using new passages and all improvements in 



ECONOMY 25 

navigation ; — charts to be studied, the position 
of reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascer- 
tained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic 
tables to be corrected, for by the error of some 
calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock 
that should have reached a friendly pier, — 
there is the untold fate of La Perouse ; — univer- 
sal science to be kept pace with, studying the 
lives of all great discoverers and navigators, 
great adventurers and merchants, from Hanno 
and the Phoenicians down to our day; in fine, 
account of stock to be taken from time to time, 
to know how you stand. It is a labor to task 
the faculties of a man, — such problems of profit 
and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gaug- 
ing of all kinds in it, as demand a universal 
knowledge. 

I have thought that Walden Pond would be 
a good place for business, not solely on account 
of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers ad- 
vantages which it may not be good policy to 
divulge; it is a good post and a good founda- 
tion. No Neva marshes to be filled; though 
you must everywhere build on piles of your 
own driving. It is said that a flood-tide, with a 
westerly wind, and ice in the Neva, would sweep 
St. Petersburg from the face of the earth. 

As this business was to be entered into without 
the usual capital, it may not be easy to conjee- 



26 WALDEN 

ture where those means, that will still be indis- 
pensable to every such undertaking, were to be 
obtained. As for Clothing, to come at once to 
the practical part of the question, perhaps we 
are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a 
regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, 
than by a true utility. Let him who has work 
to do recollect that the object of clothing is, 
first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in 
this state of society, to cover nakedness, and he 
may judge how much of any necessary or impor- 
tant work may be accomplished without adding 
to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear 
a suit but onpe, though made by some tailor or 
dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the 
comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are 
no better than wooden horses to hang the clean 
clothes on. Every day our garments become 
more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the 
impress of the wearer's character, until we 
hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay 
and medical appliances and some such solemnity 
even as our bodies. No man ever stood the 
lower in my estimation for having a patch in 
his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater 
anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at 
least clean and unpatched, clothes than to have 
a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not 
mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is 
improvidence. I sometimes try my acquaint- 



ECONOMY 27 

ances by such tests as this ; — who could wear 
a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee ? 
Most behave as if they believed that their pros- 
pects for life would be ruined if they should do 
it. It would be easier for them to hobble to 
town with a broken leg than with a broken 
pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a 
gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if 
a similar accident happens to the legs of his 
pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he con- 
siders, not what is truly respectable, but what 
is respected. We know but few men, a great 
many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow 
in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who 
would not soonest salute the scarecrow ? Pass- 
ing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and 
coat on a stake, I recognized the owner of the 
farm. He was only a little more weather- 
beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard 
of a dog that barked at every stranger who 
approached his master's premises with clothes 
on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. 
It is an interesting question how far men would 
retain their relative rank if they were divested 
of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell 
surely of any company of civilized men, which 
belonged to the most respected class ? When 
Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels 
round the world, from east to west, had got so 
near home as Asiatic Russia, she says that she 



28 WALDEN 

felt the necessity of wearing other than a travel- 
ling dress, when she went to meet the authori- 
ties, for she "was now in a civilized coun- 
try, where . . . people are judged of by their 
clothes." Even in our democratic New England 
towns the accidental possession of wealth, and 
its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, 
obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. 
But they who yield such respect, numerous as 
they are, are so far heathen, and need to have 
a missionary sent to them. Besides, clothes 
introduced sewing, a kind of work which you 
may call endless; a woman's dress, at least, is 
never done. 

A man who has at length found something to 
do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; 
for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in 
the garret for an indeterminate period. Old 
shoes will serve a hero longer than they have 
served his valet, — if a hero ever has a valet, — 
bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make 
them do. Only they who go to soirees and 
legislative halls must have new coats, coats to 
change as often as the man changes in them. 
But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, 
are fit to worship God in, they will do; will 
they not ? Who ever saw his old clothes, — 
his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into 
its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed 
of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by 



ECONOMY 29 

him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer 
still, or shall we say richer, who could do with 
less ? I say, beware of all enterprises that re- 
quire new clothes, and not rather a new wearer 
of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can 
the new clothes be made to fit? If you have 
any enterprise before you, try it in your old 
clothes. All men want, not something to do 
ivith, but something to do, or rather something 
to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new 
suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we 
have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in 
some way, that we feel like new men in the old, 
and that to retain it would be like keeping new 
wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like 
that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. 
The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. 
Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the 
caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal 
industry and expansion; for clothes are but our 
outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we 
shall be found sailing under false colors, and be 
inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, 
as well as that of mankind. 

We don garment after garment, as if we grew 
like exogenous plants by addition without. Our 
outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are 
our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not 
of our life, and may be stripped off here and 
there without fatal injury; our thicker gar- 



30 WALDEN 

merits, constantly worn, are our cellular integu- 
ment, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber or 
true bark, which cannot be removed without 
girdling and so destroying the man. I believe 
that all races at some seasons wear something 
equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a 
man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands 
on himself in the dark, and that he live in all 
respects so compactly and preparedly that, if 
an enemy take the town, he can, like the old 
philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed 
without anxiety. While one thick garment is, 
for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, 
and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices 
really to suit customers; while a thick coat can 
be bought for five dollars, which will last as 
many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, 
cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, 
a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a 
winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a 
better be made at home at a nominal cost, where 
is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own 
earning^ there will not be found wise men to do 
him reverence ? 

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, 
my tailoress tells me gravely, *'They do not 
make them so now," not emphasizing the 
**They" at all, as if she quoted an authority as 
impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult 
to get made what I want, simply because she 



ECONOMY 31 

cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I 
am so rash. When I hear this oracular sen- 
tence, I am for a moment absorbed in thou2:ht, 
emphasizing to myself each word separately 
that I may come at the meaning of it, that I 
may find out by what degree of consanguinity 
They are related to me, and what authority they 
may have in an affair which affects me so nearly ; 
and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with 
equal mystery, and without any more emphasis 
of the **they," — ''It is true, they did not make 
them so recently, but they do now." Of what 
use this measuring of me if she does not measure 
my character, but only the breadth of my 
shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on ? 
We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcse, but 
Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with 
full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts 
on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in 
America do the same. I sometimes despair 
of getting anything quite simple and honest 
done in this world by the help of men. They 
would have to be passed through a powerful 
press first, to squeeze their old notions out of 
them, so that they would not soon get upon 
their legs again, and then there would be some 
one in the company with a maggot in his head, 
hatched from an Qgg deposited there nobody 
knows when, for not even fire kills these things, 
and you would have lost your labor. Never- 



32 WALDEN 

theless we will not forget that some Egyptian 
wheat was handed down to us by a mummy. 

On the whole, I think that it cannot be main- 
tained that dressing has in this or any country 
risen to the dignity of an art. At present, men 
make shift to wear what they can get. Like 
shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they 
can find on the beach, and at a little distance, 
whether of space or time, laugh at each other's 
masquerade. Every generation laughs at the 
old fashions, but follows religiously the new. 
We are amused at beholding the costume of 
Henry VIII. , or Queen Elizabeth, as much as 
if it was that of the King and Queen of the Can- 
nibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful 
or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peer- 
ing from and the sincere life passed within it, 
which restrain laughter and consecrate the 
costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken 
with a fit of colic and his trappings will have to 
serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by 
a cannon ball, rags are as becoming as purple. 

The childish and savage taste of men and 
women for new patterns keeps how many shak- 
ing and squinting through kaleidoscopes that 
they may discover the particular figure which 
this generation requires to-day. The manu- 
facturers have learned that this taste is merely 
whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only 
by a few threads more or less of a particular 



ECONOMY 33 

color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie 
on the shelf, though it frequently happens that 
after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the 
most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is 
not the hideous custom which it is called. It 
is not barbarous merely because the printing 
is skin-deep and unalterable. 

I cannot believe that our factory system is the 
best mode by which men may get clothing. The 
condition of the operatives is becoming every 
day more like that of the English ; and it cannot 
be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or 
observed, the principal object is, not that man- 
kind may be well and honestly clad, but, un- 
questionably, that the corporations may be 
enriched. In the long run men hit only what 
they aim at. Therefore, though they should 
fail immediately, they had better aim at some- 
thing high. 

As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is 
now a necessary of life, though there are instances 
of men having done without it for long periods 
in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing 
says that "The Laplander in his skin dress, and 
in a skin bag which he puts over his head and 
shoulders, will sleep night after night on the 
snow ... in a degree of cold which would 
extinguish the life of one exposed to it in any 
woollen clothing." He has seen them asleep 



34 WALDEN 

thus. Yet he adds, '*They are not hardier than 
other people." But, probably, man did not live 
long on the earth without discovering the con- 
venience which there is in a house, the domestic 
comforts, which phrase may have originally 
signified the satisfactions of the house more than 
of the family; though these must be extremely 
partial and occasional in those climates where 
the house is associated in our thoughts with 
winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds 
of the year, except for a parasol, is unnecessary. 
In our climate, in the summer, it was formerly 
almost solely a covering at night. In the Indian 
gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's 
march, and a row of them cut or painted on the 
bark of a tree signified that so many times they 
had camped. Man was not made so large 
limbed and robust but that he must seek to 
narrow his world, and wall in a space such as 
fitted him. He was at first bare and out of doors ; 
but though this was pleasant enough in serene 
and warm weather, by daylight, the rainy season 
and the winter, to say nothing rf the torrid sun, 
would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud 
if he had not made ha^* .o clothe himself with 
the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, accord- 
ing to the fable, wore the bower before other 
clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, 
or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the 
warmth of the affections. 



ECONOMY 35 

We may imagine a time when, in the infancy 
of the human race, some enterprising mortal 
crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every 
child begins the world again, to some extent, 
and loves to stay out doors, even in wet and cold. 
It plays house, as well as horse, having an 
instinct for it. Who does not remember the 
interest with which when young he looked at 
shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave.? It 
was the natural yearning of that portion of our 
most primitive ancestor which still survived in 
us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs 
of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen 
woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of 
boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At 
last, we know not what it is to live in the open 
air, and our Uves are domestic in more senses 
than we think. From the hearth to the field 
is a great distance. It would be well perhaps 
if we were to spend more of our days and nights 
without any obstruction between us and the 
celestial bodies, ^i¥ the poet did not speak so 
much from und'^'a roof, or the saint dwell there 
so long. Birds do Noti sing in caves, nor do 
doves cherish tlieir ir ^^"fece in dovecots. 

However, if one designs to construct a dwelling 
house, it behooves hini to exercise a Uttle Yankee 
shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a 
work-house, a labyrinth without a clew, a mu- 
seum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid 



36 WALDEN 

mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight 
a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen 
Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents 
of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly 
a foot deep around them, and I thought that 
they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out 
the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living 
honestly, with freedom left for my proper pur- 
suits, was a question which vexed me even more 
than it does now, for unfortunately I am become 
somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by 
the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which 
the laborers locked up their tools at night, and 
it suggested to me that every man who was hard 
pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, 
having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit 
the air at least, get into it when it rained and at 
night, and hook down the lid, and so have free- 
dom in his love, and in his soul be free. This 
did not appear the worst, nor by any means a 
despicable alternative. You could sit up as 
late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, 
go abroad without any landlord or house-lord 
dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed 
to death to pay the rent of a larger and more 
luxurious box who would not have frozen to 
death in such a box as this. I am far from jest- 
ing. Economy is a subject which admits of 
being treated with levity, but it cannot so be 
disposed of. A comfortable house for a rude 



ECONOMY 37 

and hardy race, that Uved mostly out of doors, 
was once made here almost entirely of such 
materials as Nature furnished ready to their 
hands. Goodkin, who was superintendent of 
the Indians subject to the Massachusetts Colony, 
writing in 1674, says, *'The best of their houses 
are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with 
barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those 
seasons when the sap is up, and made into great 
flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when 
they are green. . . . The meaner sort are cov- 
ered with mats which they make of a kind of 
bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and 
warm, but not so good as the former. . . . Some 
I have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and 
thirty feet broad. ... I have often lodged in 
their wigwams, and found them as warm as the 
best English houses." He adds that they were 
commonly carpeted and lined within with well- 
wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished 
with various utensils. The Indians had ad- 
vanced so far as to regulate the effect of the 
wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the 
roof and moved by a string. Such a lodge was 
in the first instance constructed in a day or two 
at most, and taken down and put up in a few 
hours ; and every family owned one, or its apart- 
ment in one. 

In the savage state every family owns a shelter 
as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser 



38 WALDEN 

and simpler wants; but I think that I speak 
within bounds when I say that, though the birds 
of the air have their nests, and the foxes their 
holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern 
civilized society not more than one half the 
families own a shelter. In the large towns and 
cities, where civilization especially prevails, the 
number of those who own a shelter is a very 
small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an 
annual tax for this outside garment of all, be- 
come indispensable summer and winter, which 
would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now 
helps to keep them poor as long as they live. 
I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage 
of hiring compared with owning, but it is evident 
that the savage owns his shelter because it. costs 
so little, while the civilized man hires his com- 
monly because he cannot afford to own it; nor 
can he, in the long run, any better afford to hire. 
But, answers one, by merely paying this tax 
the poor civilized man secures an abode which 
is a palace compared with the savage's. An 
annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred 
dollars, these are the country rates, entitles him 
to the benefit of the improvements of centuries, 
spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, 
Rumford fire-place, back plastering, Venetian 
blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodi- 
ous cellar, and many other things. But how 
happens it that he who is said to enjoy these 



ECONOMY 39 

things is so commonly a foor civilized man, 
while the savage, who has them not, is rich as 
a savage ? If it is asserted that civilization is 
a real advance in the condition of man, — and I 
think that it is, though only the wise improve 
their advantages, — it must be shown that it has 
produced better dwellings without making them 
more costly ; and the cost of a thing is the amount 
of what I will call life which is required to be 
exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. 
An average house in this neighborhood costs 
perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up 
this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of 
the laborer's life, even if he is not encumbered 
with a family ; — estimating the pecuniary value 
of every man's labor at one dollar a day, for if 
some receive more, others receive less ; — so 
that he must have spent more than half his life 
commonly before his wigwam will be earned. 
If we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this 
is but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the 
savage have been wise to exchange his wigwam 
for a palace on these terms ? 

It may be guessed that I reduce almost the 
whole advantage of holding this superfluous 
property as a fund in store against the future, 
so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to 
the defraying of funeral expenses. But perhaps 
a man is not required to bury himself. Never- 
theless this points to an important distinction 



40 WALDEN 

between the civilized man and the savage; and, 
no doubt, they have designs on us for our bene- 
fit, in making the Ufe of a civihzed people an 
institution, in which the life of the individual 
is to a great extent absorbed, in order to preserve 
and perfect that of the race. But I wish to show 
at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present 
obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly 
so live as to secure all the advantage without 
suffering any of the disadvantage. What mean 
ye by saying that the poor ye have always with 
you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, 
and the children's teeth are set on edge ? 

*'As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not 
have occasion any more to use this proverb in 
Israel." 

''Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of 
the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: 
the soul that sinneth it shall die." 

When I consider my neighbors, the farmers 
of Concord, who are at least as well off as the 
other classes, I find that for the most part they 
have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, 
that they may become the real owners of their 
farms, which commonly they have inherited 
with encumbrances, or else bought with hired 
money, — and we may regard one third of that 
toil as the cost of their houses, — but commonly 
they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the 
encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value 



ECONOMY 41 

of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one 
great encumbrance, and still a man is found to 
inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he 
says. On applying to the assessors, I am sur- 
prised to learn that they cannot at once name 
a dozen in the town who own their farms free 
and clear. If you would know the history of 
these homesteads, inquire at the bank where 
they are mortgaged. The man who has actually 
paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that 
every neighbor can point to him. I doubt if 
there are three such men in Concord. What 
has been said of the merchants ^ that a very large 
majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are 
sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. With 
regard to the merchants, however, one of them 
says pertinently that a great part of their failures 
are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely 
failures to fulfil their engagements, because it 
is inconvenient ; that is, it is the moral character 
that breaks down. But this puts an infinitely 
worse face on the matter, and suggests, besides, 
that probably not even the other three succeed 
in sa\ing their souls, but are perchance bank- 
rupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly. 
Bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring- 
boards from which much of our civilization 
vaults and turns its somersets, but the savage 
stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet 
the INIiddlesex Cattle Show goes off here with 



42 WALDEN 

eclat annually, as if all the joints of the agricul- 
tural machine were suent. 
-4| The farmer is endeavoring to solve the prob- 
lem of a livelihood by a formula more compli- 
cated than the problem itself. To get his shoe- 
strings he speculates in herds of cattle. With 
consummate skill he has set his trap with a hair 
springe to catch comfort and independence, and 
then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. 
This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar 
reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand 
savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. 
As Chapman sings : — 

*'The false society of men — 

— for earthly greatness 
All heavenly comforts rarefies to air." 

And when the farmer has got his house, he 
may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and 
it be the house that has got him. As I under- 
stand it, that was a valid objection urged by 
Momus against the house which Minerva made, 
that she "had not made it movable, by which 
means a bad neighborhood might be avoided;" 
and it may still be urged, for our houses are 
such unwieldy property that we are often 
imprisoned rather than housed in them; and 
the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own 
scurvy selves. I know one or two families, at 
least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation. 



ECONOMY 43 

have been wishing to sell their houses in the out- 
skirts and move into the village, but have not 
been able to accomplish it, and only death will 
set them free. 

Granted that the majority are able at last 
either to own or hire the modern house with 
all its improvements. While civilization has 
been improving our houses, it has not equally 
improved the men who are to inhabit them. It 
has created palaces, but it was not so easy to 
create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized 
man's pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, 
if he is employed the greater part of his life in 
obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, 
why should we have a better dwelling than the 
former? 

But how do the poor minority fare ? Perhaps 
it will be found that just in proportion as some 
have been placed in outward circumstances 
above the savage, others have been degraded 
below him. The luxury of one class is counter- 
balanced by the indigence of another. On the 
one side is the palace, on the other are the alms- 
house and "silent poor." The myriads who 
built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pha- 
raohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not 
decently buried themselves. The mason who 
finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night 
perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. 
It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country 



44 WALDEN 

where the usual evidences of civilization exist, 
the condition of a very large body of the inhabit- 
ants may not be as degraded as that of savages. 
I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the 
degraded rich. To know this I should not need 
to look farther than to the shanties which every- 
where border our railroads, that last improve- 
ment in civilization; where I see in my daily 
walks human beings living in sties, and all winter 
with an open door, for the sake of light, without 
any visible, often imaginable, wood pile, and 
the forms of both old and young are perma- 
nently contracted by the long habit of shrinking 
from cold and misery, and the development of 
all their limbs and faculties is checked. It 
certainly is fair to look at that class by whose 
labor the works which distinguish this genera- 
tion are accomplished. Such too, to a greater 
or less extent, is the condition of the operatives 
of every denomination in England, which is 
the great workhouse of the world. Or I could 
refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of 
the white or enlightened spots on the map. 
Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with 
that of the North American Indian, or the South 
Sea Islander, or any other savage race before 
it was degraded by contact with the civilized 
man. Yet I have no doubt that that people's 
rulers are as wise as the average of civilized 
rulers. Their condition only proves what 



ECONOMY 45 

squalidness may consist with civilization. I 
hardly need refer now to the laborers of our 
Southern States who produce the staple exports 
of this country, and are themselves a staple 
production of the South. But to confine myself 
to those who are said to be in moderate circum- 
stances. 

Most men appear never to have considered 
what a house is, and are actually though need- 
lessly poor all their lives because they think 
that they must have such a one as their neigh- 
bors have. As if one were to wear any sort of 
coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or, 
gradually leaving off palmleaf hat or cap of 
woodchuck skin, complain of hard times be- 
cause he could not afford to buy him a crown ! 
It is possible to invent a house still more conven- 
ient and luxurious than we have, which yet all 
would admit that man could not afford to pay 
for. Shall we always study to obtain more of 
these things, and not sometimes to be content 
with less ? Shall the respectable citizen thus 
gravely teach, by precept and example, the neces- 
sity of the young man's providing a certain num- 
ber of superfluous glowshoes, and umbrellas, 
and empty guest chambers for empty guests, 
before he dies ? Why should not our furniture 
he as simple as the Arab's or the Indian's ? 
When I think of the benefactors of the race, 
whom we have apotheosized as messengers from 



^ 



46 WALDEN 

heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not 
see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any 
car-load of fashionable furniture. Or what if 
I were to allow — would it not be a singular 
allowance ? — that our furniture should be more 
complex than the Arab's, in proportion as we 
are morally and intellectually his superiors ! 
At present our houses are cluttered and defiled 
with it, and a good housewife would sweep out 
the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave 
her morning's work undone. Morning work ! 
By the blushes of Aurora and the music of 
Memnon, what should be man's morning work 
in this world ? I had three pieces of limestone on 
my desk, but I was terrified to find that they 
required to be dusted daily, when the furniture 
of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw 
them out the window in disgust. How, then, 
could I have a furnished house ? I would rather 
sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the 
grass, unless where man has broken ground. 

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the 
fashions which the herd so diligently follow. 
The traveller who stops at the best houses, so 
called, soon discovers this, for the publicans pre- 
sume him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he re- 
signed himself to their tender mercies he would 
soon be completely emasculated. I think that 
in the railroad car we are inclined to spend 
more on luxury than on safety and convenience. 



ECONOMY 47 

and it threatens without attaining these to be- 
come no better than a modern drawing-room, 
with its divans, and ottomans, and sunshades, 
and a hundred other Oriental things, which we 
are taking west w^ith us, invented for the ladies 
of the harem and the effeminate natives of the 
Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be 
ashamed to know the names of. I would rather 
sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than 
be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather 
ride on earth in an ox cart with a free circula- 
tion, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an 
excursion train and breathe a malaria all the 
^^ay. 

The very simplicity and nakedness of man's 
life in the primitive ages imply this advantage 
at least, that they left him still but a sojourner 
in nature. When he was refreshed with food 
and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. 
He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and 
was either threading the valleys, or crossing the 
plains, or climbing the mountain tops. But lo ! 
men have become the tools of their tools. The 
man who independently plucked the fruits when 
he was hungry is become a farmer : and he who 
stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. 
We now no longer camp as for a night, but have 
settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We 
have adopted Christianity merely as an improved 
method of a^n-culture. We have built for this 



48 WALDEN 

world a family mansion, and for the next a family 
tomb. The best works of art are the expression 
of man's struggle to free himself from this con- 
dition, but the effect of our art is merely to make 
this low state comfortable and that higher state 
to be forgotten. There is actually no place in 
this village for a work of fine art, if any had come 
down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and 
streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There 
is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to 
receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I 
consider how our houses are built and paid for, 
or not paid for, and their internal economy man- 
aged and sustained, I wonder that the floor does 
not give way under the visitor while he is ad- 
miring the gewgaws upon the mantel-piece, and 
let him through into the cellar, to some solid and 
honest though earthy foundation. > I cannot but 
perceive that this so-called rich and refined life 
is a thing jumped at, and I do not get on in the 
enjoyment of the jine arts which adorn it, my 
attention being wholly occupied with the jump ; 
for I remember that the greatest genuine leap, 
due to human muscles alone, on record is that 
of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have 
cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. With- 
out factitious support, man is sure to come to 
earth again beyond that distance. The first 
question which I am tempted to put to the pro- 
prietor of such great impropriety is. Who bol- 



ECONOMY 49 

sters you ? Are you one of the ninety-seven who 
fail, or the three who succeed ? Answer me these 
questions, and then perhaps I may look at your 
baubles and find them ornamental. The cart 
before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. 
Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful 
objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives 
must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping 
and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: 
now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated 
out of doors, where there is no house and no 
housekeeper. 

Old Johnson, in his " Wonder- Working Provi- 
dence," speaking of the first settlers of this town, 
with whom he was contemporary, tells us that 
''they burrow themselves in the earth for their 
first shelter under some hillside, and, casting the 
soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky fire 
against the earth, at the highest side." They 
did not "provide them houses," says he, "till the 
earth, by the Lord's blessing, brought forth 
bread to feed them," and the first year's crop 
was so light that "they were forced to cut their 
bread very thin for a long season." The secre- 
tary of the Province of New Netherland, writ- 
ing in Dutch, in 1650, for the information of 
those who wished to take up land there, states 
more particularly, that "those in New Nether- 
land, and especially in New England, who have 
no means to build farm houses at first according 



50 WALDEN 

to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, 
cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and 
as broad as they think proper, case the earth 
inside with wood all round the wall, and line the 
wood with the bark of trees or something else to 
prevent the caving in of the earth ; floor this 
cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a 
ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover 
the spars with bark or green sods, so that they 
can live dry and warm in these houses with their 
entire families for two, three, and four years, it 
being understood that partitions are run through 
those cellars, which are adapted to the size of 
the family. The wealthy and principal men in 
New England, in the beginning of the colonies, 
commenced their first dwelling houses in this 
fashion for two reasons: firstly, in order not to 
waste time in building, and not to want food the 
next season ; secondly, in order not to discourage 
poor laboring people whom they brought over in 
numbers from Fatherland. In the course of three 
or four years, when the country became adapted 
to agriculture, they built themselves handsome 
houses, spending on them several thousands." 

In this course which our ancestors took there 
was a show of prudence at least, as if their prin- 
ciple were to satisfy the more pressing wants 
first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied 
now ? When I think of acquiring for myself 
one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred. 



ECONOMY 51 

for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to 
human culture, and we are still forced to cut our 
spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers 
did their wheaten. Not that all architectural 
ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest 
period; but let our houses first be lined with 
beauty, where they come in contact with our 
lives, like the tenement of the shellfish, and not 
overlaid with it. But, alas ! I have been inside 
one or two of them, and know what they are 
lined with. 

Though we are not so degenerate but that we 
might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or 
wear skins to-day, it certainly is better to accept 
the advantages, though so dearly bought, which 
the invention and industry of mankind offer. In 
such a neighborhood as this, boards and shingles, 
lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily 
obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or 
bark in sufiicient quantities, or even well-tem- 
pered clay or flat stones. I speak understand- 
ingly on this subject, for I have made myself 
acquainted with it both theoretically and prac- 
tically. With a little more wit we might use these 
materials so as to become richer than the richest 
now are, and make our civilization a blessing. 
The civilized man is a more experienced and 
wiser savage. But to make haste to my own 
experiment. 



52 WALDEN 

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an 
axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, 
nearest to where I intended to build my house, 
and began to cut down some tall arrowy white 
pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is diffi- 
cult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it 
is the most generous course thus to permit your 
fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. 
The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on 
it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I 
returned it sharper than I received it. It was a 
pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with 
pine woods, through which I looked out on the 
pond, and a small open field in the woods where 
pines and hickories were springing up. The 
ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though 
there were some open spaces, and it was all dark 
colored and saturated with water. There were 
some slight flurries of snow during the days that 
I worked there; but for the most part when I 
came out on to the railroad, on my way home, 
its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in 
the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the 
spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and 
other birds already come to commence another 
year with us. They were pleasant spring days, 
in which the winter of man's discontent was 
thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had 
lain torpid began to stretch itself. One day, 
when my axe had come off and I had cut a green 




The site of Thoreau's house in March 



ECONOMY 53 

hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and 
had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in 
order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake 
run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, 
apparently without inconvenience, as long as I 
stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour ; 
perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out 
of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a 
like reason men remain in their present low and 
primitive condition; but if they should feel the 
influence of the spring of springs arousing them, 
they would of necessity rise to a higher and more 
ethereal life. I had previously seen the snakes 
in frosty mornings in my path with portions of 
their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting 
for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st of April it 
rained and melted the ice, and in the early part 
of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray 
goose groping about over the pond and cackling 
as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog. 

So I went on for some days cutting and hew- 
ing timber, and also studs and rafters, all with 
my narrow axe, not having many communicable 
or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself, — 

Men say they know many things; 

But lo ! they have taken wings. 

The arts and sciences, 

And a thousand appliances; 

The wind that blows 

Is all that anybody knows. 



54 WALDEN 

I hewed the main timbers six inches square, 
most of the studs on two sides only, and the 
rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving 
the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as 
straight and much stronger than sawed ones. 
Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned by 
its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this 
time. My days in the woods were not very long 
ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of bread 
and butter, and read the newspaper in which it 
was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green 
pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread 
was imparted some of their fragrance, for my 
hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch. 
'Before I had done I was more the friend than the 
foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some 
of them, having become better acquainted with 
it. Sometimes a rambler in the wood was at- 
tracted by the sound of my axe, and we chatted 
pleasantly over the chips which I had made. 

By the middle of April, for I made no haste in 
my work, but rather made the most of it, my 
house was framed and ready for the raising. I 
had already bought the shanty of James Collins, 
an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Rail- 
road, for boards. James Collins' shanty was 
considered an uncommonly fine one. When I 
called to see it he was not at home. I walked 
about the outside, at first unobserved from 
within, the window was so deep and high. It 



ECONOMY 55 

was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage 
roof, and not much else to be seen, the dirt being 
raised five feet all around as if it were a compost 
heap. The roof was the soundest part, though 
a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun. 
Door-sill there was none, but a perennial pas- 
sage for the hens under the door board. Mrs. 
C. came to the door and asked me to view it from 
the inside. The hens were driven in by my 
approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor for 
the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only 
here a board and there a board which would not 
bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me 
the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that 
the board floor extended under the bed, warning 
me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole 
two feet deep. In her own words, they were 
''good boards overhead, good boards all around, 
and a good window," — of two whole squares 
originally, only the cat had passed out that way 
lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to 
sit, an infant in the house where it was born, a 
silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a 
patent new coffee mill nailed to an oak sapling, 
all told. The bargain was soon concluded, for 
James had in the meanwhile returned. I to 
pay four dollars and twenty-five cents to-night, 
he to vacate at five to-morrow morning, selling to 
nobody else meanwhile : I to take possession at 
six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and 



56 WALDEN 

anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust 
claims, on the score of ground rent and fuel. 
This he assured me was the only encumbrance. 
At six I passed him and his family on the road. 
\\ One large bundle held their all, — bed, coffee 
mill, looking-glass, hens, — all but the cat, she 
took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, 
as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for 
woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last, v 

I took down this dwelling the same morning, 
drawing the nails, and removed it to the pond 
side by small cartloads, spreading the boards on 
the grass there to bleach and warp back again in 
the sun. One early thrush gave me a note or 
two as I drove along the woodland path. I was 
informed treacherously by a young Patrick that 
neighbor Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of 
the carting, transferred the still tolerable, straight, 
and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his 
pocket, and then stood when I came back to 
pass the time of day, and look freshly up, un- 
concerned with spring thoughts, at the devasta- 
tion; there being a dearth of work, as he said. 
He was there to represent spectatordom, and 
help make this seemingly insignificant event one 
with the removal of the gods of Troy. 

I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to 
the south, where a woodchuck had formerly dug 
his burrow, down through sumach and black- 
berry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation. 



ECONOMY 57 

six feet square by seven deep, to a fine sand 
where potatoes would not freeze in any winter. 
The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; 
but the sun having never shone on them, the 
sand still keeps its place. It was but two hours' 
work. I took particular pleasure in this break- 
ing of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig 
into the earth for an equable temperature. Un- 
der the most splendid house in the city is still to 
be found the cellar where they store their roots 
as of old, and long after the superstructure has 
disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth. 
The house is still but a sort of porch at the 
entrance of a burrow. 

At length, in the beginning of May, with the 
help of some of my acquaintances, rather to im- 
prove so good an occasion for neighborliness 
than from any necessity, I set up the frame of 
my house. No man was ever more honored in 
the character of his raisers than I. They are 
destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier 
structures one day. I began to occupy my house 
on the 4th of July, as soon as it was boarded and 
roofed, for the boards were carefully feather- 
edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly im- 
pervious to rain; but before boarding I laid the 
foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing 
two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond 
in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing 
in the fall, before a fire became necessary for 



58 WALDEN 

warmth, doing my cooking in the meanwhile out 
of doors on the ground, early in the morning: 
which mode I still think is in some respects more 
convenient and agreeable than the usual one. 
When it stormed before my bread was baked, I 
fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under 
them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant 
hours in that way. In those days, when my hands 
were much employed, I read but little, but the 
least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, 
my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much 
entertainment, in fact answered the same pur- 
pose, as the Iliad. 

It would be worth the while to build still more 
deliberately than I did, considering, for instance, 
what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a 
garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance 
never raising any superstructure until we found 
a better reason for it than our temporal necessi- 
ties even. There is some of the same fitness in a 
man's building his own house that there is in a 
bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if 
men constructed their dwellings with their own 
hands, and provided food for themselves and 
families simply and honestly enough, the poetic 
faculty would be universally developed, as birds 
universally sing when they are so engaged ? 
But alas ! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, 
which lay their eggs in nests which other birds 



ECONOMY 59 

have built, and cheer no traveller with their 
chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we for- 
ever resign the pleasure of construction to the 
carpenter? What does architecture amount to 
in the experience of the mass of men ? I never 
in all my walks came across a man engaged in so 
simple and natural an occupation as building his 
house. We belong to the community. It is not 
the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man : 
it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, 
and the farmer. Where is this division of labor 
to end ? and what object does it finally serve ? 
No doubt another may also think for me; but 
it is not therefore desirable that he should do so 
1:o the exclusion of my thinking for myself. 

True, there are architects so called in this 
country, and I have heard of one at least pos- 
sessed with the idea of making architectural or- 
naments have a core of truth, a necessity, and 
hence a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. 
All very well perhaps from his point of view, but 
only a little better than the common dilettant- 
ism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, 
he began at the cornice, not at the foundation. 
It was only how to put a core of truth within the 
ornaments, that every sugar plum in fact might 
have an almond or caraway seed in it, — though 
I hold that almonds are most wholesome with- 
out the sugar, — and not how the inhabitant, 
the indweller, might build truly within and with- 



60 Wx\LDEN 

out, and let the ornaments take care of them- 
selves. What reasonable man ever supposed 
that ornaments were something outward and 
in the skin merely, — that the tortoise got his 
spotted shell, or the shellfish its mother-o'-pearl 
tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of 
Broadway their Trinity Church ? But a man 
has no more to do with the style of architecture 
of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell : 
nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint 
the precise color of his virtue on his standard. 
The enemy will find it out. He may turn pale 
when the trial comes. This man seemed to me 
to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his 
half truth to the rude occupants, who really 
knew it better than he. What of architectural 
beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown 
from within outward, out of the necessities and 
character of the indweller, who is the only 
builder, — out of some unconscious truthful- 
ness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for 
the appearance ; and whatever additional beauty 
of this kind is destined to be produced will be 
preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. 
The most interesting dwellings in this country, 
as the painter knows, are the most unpretend- 
ing, humble log huts and cottages of the poor 
commonly ; it is the life of the inhabitants whose 
shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their 
surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; 



ECONOMY 61 

and equally interesting will be the citizen's 
suburban box, when his life shall be as simple 
and as agreeable to the imagination, and there 
is as little straining after effect in the style of his 
dwelling. A great proportion of architectural 
ornaments are literally hollow, and a Septem- 
ber gale would strip them off, like borrowed 
plumes, without injury to the substantials. 
They can do without architecture who have no 
olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal 
ado were made about the ornaments of style 
in literature, and the architects of our Bibles 
spent as much time about their cornices as the 
architects of our churches do ? So are made 
the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their 
professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, 
how a few sticks are slanted over him or under 
him, and what colors are daubed upon his 
box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any ear- 
nest sense, he slanted them and daubed it; but 
the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is 
of a piece with constructing his own coffin, — 
the architecture of the grave, and "carpenter" 
is but another name for "coffin-maker." One 
man says, in his despair or indifference to life, 
take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and 
paint your house that color. Is he thinking of 
his last and narrow house ? Toss up a copper 
for it as well. What an abundance of leisure he 
must have ! Why do you take up a handful of 



62 WALDEN 

the dirt? Better paint your house your own 
complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you. 
An enterprise to improve the style of cottage 
architecture ! When you have got my orna- 
ments ready I will wear them. 

Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled 
the sides of my house, which were already im- 
pervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy 
shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose 
edges I was obliged to straighten with a plane. 

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered 
house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight- 
feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large 
window on each side, two trap doors, one door 
at the end, and a brick fire-place opposite. The 
exact cost of my house, paying the usual price 
for such materials as I used, but not counting 
the work, all of which was done by myself, was 
as follows; and I give the details because very 
few are able to tell exactly what their houses 
cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of 
the various materials which compose them : — 

Boards $8 03j ( ^"^''^/''^^'y 

[^ boards. 

Refuse shingles for roof and sides . 4 00 

Laths 1 25 

Two second-hand windows with glass 2 43 

One thousand old brick 4 00 

Two casks of lime 2 40 That was high. 

More than I 



Hair 31, , , 

needed 



1 



ECONOMY 63 

Mantle- tree iron $0 15 

Nails 3 90 

Hinges and screws 14 

Latch 10 

Chalk 01 

r^ . . . ^ f I carried a good 

Transportation 140-^ ^ u i 

^ (^ part on my back. 

In all $28 12i 

These are all the materials excepting the 
timber, stones, and sand, which I claimed by 
squatter's right. I have also a small wood-shed 
adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was 
left after building the house. 

I intend to build me a house which will sur- 
pass any on the main street in Concord in grand- 
eur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much 
and will cost me no more than my present one. 

I thus found that the student who wishes for 
a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an ex- 
pense not greater than the rent which he now 
pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is 
becoming, my excuse is that I brag for human- 
ity rather than for myself; and my short-com- 
injxs and inconsistencies do not affect the truth 
of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant 
and hypocrisy, — chaff which I find it difficult 
to separate from my wheat, but for which I am 
as sorry as any man, — I will breathe freely and 
stretch myself in this respect, it is such a relief 
to both the moral and physical system; and I 
am resolved that I will not through humility 



64 WALDEN 

become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to 
speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge 
College the mere rent of a student's room, which 
is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dol- 
lars each year, though the corporation had the 
advantage of building thirty-two side by side 
and under one roof, and the occupant suffers 
the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, 
and perhaps a residence in the fourth story. I 
cannot but think that if we had more true wis- 
dom in these respects, not only less education 
would be needed, because, forsooth, more would 
already have been acquired, but the pecuniary 
expense of getting an education would in a 
great measure vanish. Those conveniences 
which the student requires at Cambridge or 
elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times 
as great a sacrifice of life as they would with 
proper management on both sides. Those 
things for which the most money is demanded 
are never the things which the student most 
wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important 
item in the term bill, while for the far more 
valuable education which he gets by associating 
with the most cultivated of his contemporaries 
no charge is made. The mode of founding a 
college is, commonly, to get up a subscription 
of dollars and cents, and then following blindly 
the principles of a division of labor to its ex- 
treme, a principle which should never be fol- 




One of the pitch pines by the shore of Walden 



ECONOMY 65 

lowed but with circumspection, — to call in a 
contractor who makes this a subject of specula- 
tion, and he employs Irishmen or other opera- 
tives actually to lay the foundations, while the 
students that are to be are said to be fitting 
themselves for it; and for these oversights suc- 
cessive generations have to pay. I think that 
it would be better than this, for the students, or 
those who desire to be benefited by it, even to 
lay the foundation themselves. The student who 
secures his coveted leisure and retirement by 
systematically shirking any labor necessary to 
man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable 
leisure, defrauding himself of the experience 
which alone can make leisure fruitful. *'But," 
says one, "you do not mean that the students 
should go to work with their hands instead of 
their heads .^" I do not mean that exactly, but 
I mean something which he might think a good 
deal like that ; I mean that they should not play 
life, or study it merely, while the community 
supports them at this expensive game, but ear- 
nestly live it from beginning to end. How could 
youths better learn to live than by at once trying 
the experiment of living ? Methinks this would 
exercise their minds as much as mathematics. 
If I wished a boy to know something about the 
arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pur- 
sue the common course, which is merely to send 
him into the neighborhood of some professor, 

3 



66 WALDEN 

where anything is professed and practised but 
the art of life ; — to survey the world through a 
telescope or a microscope, and never with his 
natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn 
how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not 
learn how it is earned ; to discover new satellites 
to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, 
or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself ; or 
to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all 
around him, while contemplating the monsters 
in a drop of vinegar. Which would have ad- 
vanced the most at the end of a month, — the 
boy who had made his own jackknife from the 
ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as 
much as would be necessary for this, — or the 
boy who had attended the lectures on metal- 
lurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had 
received a Rogers' penknife from his father? 
Which would be most likely to cut his fingers ? 
. . . To my astonishment I was informed on 
leaving college that I had studied navigation ! — 
why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor 
I should have known more about it. Even the 
jjoor student studies and is taught only apolitical 
economy, while that economy of living which is 
synonymous with philosophy is not even sin- 
cerely professed in our colleges. The conse- 
quence is that while he is reading Adam Smith, 
Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt 
irretrievably. 



ECONOMY 67 

As with our colleges, so with a hundred 
'* modern improvements": there is an illusion 
about them; there is not always a positive ad- 
vance. The devil goes on exacting compound 
interest to the last for his early share and nu- 
merous succeeding investments in them. Our 
inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which dis- 
tract our attention from serious things. They 
are but improved means to an unimproved end, 
an end which it was already but too easy to 
arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New 
York. We are in great haste to construct a 
magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but 
Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing im- 
portant to communicate. Either is in such a 
predicament as the man who was earnest to be 
introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but 
when he was presented, and one end of her ear 
trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to 
say. As if the main object were to talk fast and 
not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel 
under the Atlantic and bring the old world some 
weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the 
first news that will leak through into the broad, 
flapping American ear will be that the Princess 
Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, 
the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute 
does not carry the most important messages ; he 
is not an evangelist, nor does he come round 
eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if 



68 WALDEN 

Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to 
mill. 

One says to me, "I wonder that you do not 
lay up money; you love to travel; you might 
take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and 
see the country." But I am wiser than that. I 
have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that 
goes afoot. I say to my friend. Suppose we try 
who will get there first. The distance is thirty 
miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a 
day's wages. I remember when wages were 
sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. 
Well, I start now on foot, and get there before 
night; I have travelled at that rate by the week 
together. You will in the meanwhile have 
earned your fare, and arrive there sometime to- 
morrow, or possibly this evening, if you are 
lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of 
going to Fitchburg, you will be working here 
the greater part of the day. And so, if the rail- 
road reached round the world, I think that I 
should keep ahead of you ; and as for seeing the 
country and getting experience of that kind, I 
should have to cut your acquaintance altogether. 

Such is the universal law, which no man can 
ever outwit, and with regard to the railroad 
even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To 
make a railroad round the world available to 
all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole 
surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct 



ECONOMY 69 

notion that if they keep up this activity of joint 
stocks and spades long enough all will at length 
ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for 
nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the 
depot, and the conductor shouts "All aboard!" 
when the smoke is blown away and the vapor 
<iondensed, it will be perceived that a few are 
riding J:)ut the rest are run over, — and it will be 
called, and will be, *'A melancholy accident." 
No doubt they can ride at last who shall have 
earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, 
but they will probably have lost their elasticity 
and desire to travel by that time. This spend- 
ing of the best part of one's life earning money 
in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during 
the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the 
Englishman who went to India to make a for- 
tune first, in order that he might return to Eng- 
land and live the life of a poet. He should have 
gone up garret at once. *'What!" exclaim a 
million Irishmen starting up from all the shan- 
ties in the land, ''is not this railroad which we 
have built a good thing .^" Yes, I answer, 
com'paratively good, that is, you might have 
done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of 
mine, that you could have spent your time bet- 
ter than digging in this dirt. 

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn 
ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agree- 



70 WALDEN 

able method, in order to meet my unusual ex- 
penses, I planted about two acres and a half of 
light and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, 
but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas, 
and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven 
acres, mostly growing up to pines and hickories, 
and was sold the preceding season for eight dol- 
lars and eight cents an acre. One farmer said 
that it was '*good for nothing but to raise cheep- 
ing squirrels on." I put no manure whatever 
on this land, not being the owner, but merely a 
squatter, and not expecting to cultivate so 
much again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. 
I got out several cords of stumps in ploughing, 
which supplied me with fuel for a long time, 
and left small circles of virgin mould, easily dis- 
tinguishable through the summer by the greater 
luxuriance of the beans there. The dead and 
for the most part unmerchantable wood be- 
hind my house, and the driftwood from the 
pond, have supplied the remainder of my fuel. 
I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the 
ploughing, though I held the plough myself. 
My farm outgoes for the first season were, for 
implements, seed, work, &c., $14 72 J. The 
seed corn was given me. This never costs any- 
thing to speak of, unless you plant more than 
enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and 
eighteen bushels of potatoes, besides some peas 
and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips 



ECONOMY 71 

were too late to come to anything. My whole 
income from the farm was 

$23 44 
Deducting the outgoes 14 72^ 



There are left $8 7l4 

besides produce consumed and on hand at the 
time this estimate was made of the value of 
$4 50, — the amount on hand much more than 
balancing a little grass w^hich I did not raise. 
All things considered, that is, considering the 
importance of a man's soul and of to-day, not- 
withstanding the short time occupied by my 
experiment, nay, partly even because of its tran- 
sient character, I believe that that was doing 
better than any farmer in Concord did that 
year. 

The next year I did better still, for I spaded 
up all the land which I required, about a third 
of an acre, and I learned from the experience 
of both years, not being in the least awed by 
many celebrated works on husbandry, Arthur 
Young among the rest, that if one would live 
simply and eat only the crop which he raised, 
and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange 
it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious 
and expensive things, he would need to culti- 
vate only a few rods of ground, and that it would 
be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen 
to plough it, and to select a fresh spot from time 
to time than to manure the old, and he could 



72 WALDEN 

do all his necessary farm work as it were with 
his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and 
thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or 
cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak 
impartially on this point, and as one not inter- 
ested in the success or failure of the present 
economical and social arrangements. I was 
more independent than any farmer in Concord, 
for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but 
could follow the bent of my genius, which is a 
very crooked one, every moment. Besides being 
better off than they already, if my house had 
been burned or my crops had failed, I should 
have been nearly as well off as before. 

I am wont to think that men are not so much 
the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of 
men, the former are so much the freer. Men 
and oxen exchange work; but if we consider 
necessary work only, the oxen will be seen to 
have greatly the advantage, their farm is so 
much the larger. Man does some of his part 
of the exchange work in his six weeks of haying, 
and it is no boy's play. Certainly no nation 
that lived simply in all respects, that is, no 
nation of philosophers, would commit so great 
a blunder as to use the labor of animals. True, 
there never was and is not likely soon to be a 
nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is 
desirable that there should be. However, I 
should never have broken a horse or bull and 



ECONOMY 73 

taken him to board for any work he might do 
for me, for fear I should become a horseman or 
a herdsman merely; and if society seems to be 
the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what 
is one man's gain is not another's loss, and that 
the stable-boy has equal cause with his master 
to be satisfied ? Granted that some public works 
would not have been constructed without this 
aid, and let man share the glory of such with 
the ox and horse; does it follow that he could 
not have accomplished works yet more worthy 
of himself in that case? When men begin to 
do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but 
luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, 
it is inevitable that a few do all the exchange 
work with the oxen, or, in other words, become 
the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only 
works for the animal within him, but, for a 
symbol of this, he works for the animal without 
him. Though we have many substantial houses 
of brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer 
is still measured by the degree to which the barn 
overshadows the house. This town is said to 
have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and 
horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in 
its public buildings ; but there are very few halls 
for free worship or free speech in this county. 
It should not be by their architecture, but why 
not even by their power of abstract thought, 
that nations should seek to commemorate them- 



74 WALDEN 

selves ? How much more admirable the Bhagvat- 
Geeta than all the ruins of the East ! Towers 
and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple 
and independent mind does not toil at the bid- 
ding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to 
any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, 
or marble, except to a trifling extent. To what 
end, pray, is so much stone hammered ? In 
Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any 
hammering stone. Nations are possessed with 
an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory 
of themselves by the amount of hammered 
stone they leave. What if equal pains were 
taken to smooth and polish their manners ? 
One piece of good sense would be more memo- 
rable thaili a monument as high as the moon. 
I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur 
of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible 
is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest 
man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes that 
has wandered farther from the true end of life. 
The religion and civilization which are bar- 
baric and heathenish build splendid temples; 
but what you might call Christianity does not. 
Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward 
its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the 
Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them 
so much as the fact that so many men could be 
found degraded enough to spend their lives 
constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby. 













■^ 






ECONOMY 75 

whom it would have been wiser and manher 
to have drowned in the Nile, and then given 
his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent 
some excuse for them and him, but I have no 
time for it. As for the religion and love of art 
of the builders, it is much the same all the world 
over, whether the building be an Egyptian 
temple or the United States Bank. It costs 
more than it comes to. The mainspring is 
vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread 
and butter. Mr. Balcom, a promising young 
architect, designs it on the back of his Vitruvius, 
with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out 
to Dobson & Sons, stonecutters. When the 
thirty centuries begin to look down on it, man- 
kind begin to look up at it. As for your high 
towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow 
once in this town who undertook to dig through 
to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he 
heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but 
I think that I shall not go out of my way to ad- 
mire the hole which he made. Many are con- 
cerned about the monuments of the West and 
East, — to know who built them. For my part, 
I should like to know who in those days did not 
build them, — who were above such trifling. 
But to proceed with my statistics. 

By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of 
various other kinds in the village in the mean- 
while, for I have as many trades as fingers, I 



76 



WALDEN 



had earned $13 34. The expense of food for 
eight months, namely, from July 4th to March 
1st, the time when these estimates were made, 
though I lived there more than two years, — not 
counting potatoes, a little green corn, and some 
peas, which I had raised, nor considering the 
value of what was on hand at the last date, was 



Rice .... 


$173i 


Molasses . . . 


173 


Rye meal . . 


104i 


Indian meal . 


99i 


Pork .... 


22 


Flour .... 


88 


Sugar .... 


80 


Lard .... 


65 


Apples . . . 


25 


Dried apple . 


22 


Sweet potatoes 


10 


One pumpkin 


06 


One watermelon 


02 


Salt 


03 



Cheapest form of the saccharine. 
Cheaper than rye. 



{Costs more than Indian meal, 
both money and trouble. 






B 
o' 



Yes, I did eat $8 74, all told ; but I should not 
thus unblushingly publish my guilt, if I did not 
know that most of my readers were equally 
guilty with myself, and that their deeds would 
look no better in print. The next year I some- 
times caught a mess of fish for my dinner, and 
once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck 
which ravaged my beanfield, — effect his trans- 
migration, as a Tartar would say, — and devour 



ECONOMY 77 

him, partly for experiment's sake; but though 
it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, not- 
withstanding a musky flavor, I saw that the 
longest use would not make that a good practice, 
however it might seem to have your woodchucks 
ready dressed by the village butcher. 

Clothing and some incidental expenses within 
the same dates, though little can be inferred from 
this item, amounted to 

$8 40f 
Oil and some household utensils 2 00 

So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for 
washing and mending, which for the most part 
were done out of the house, and their bills have 
not yet been received, — and these are all and 
more than all the ways by which money neces- 
sarily goes out in this part of the world, - — were 

House ,,,,,.... $28 12i 

Farm one year .,,,,,,,... 14 72^ 

Food eight months . . , . , 8 74 

Clothing, &c., eight months 8 40f 

Oil, &€., eight months 2 00 

In all $6199f 

I address myself now to those of my readers who 
have a living to get. And to meet this I have 
for farm produce sold 

$23 44 

Earned by day-labor 13 34 

In all $36 78 



78 WALDEN 

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes 
leaves a balance of $25 2 If on the one side, — 
this being very nearly the means with which I 
started, and the measure of expenses to be 
incurred, — and on the other, besides the leisure 
and independence and health thus secured, a 
comfortable house for me as long as I choose 
to occupy it. 

These statistics, however accidental and there- 
fore uninstructive they may appear, as they 
have a certain completeness, have a certain 
value also. Nothing was given me of which I 
have not rendered some account. It appears 
from the above estimate, that my food alone 
cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a 
week. It was, for nearly two years after this, 
rye and Indian meal without yeast, potatoes, 
rice, a very little salt pork, molasses, and salt, 
and my drink water. It was fit that I should 
live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the phil- 
osophy of India. To meet the objections of 
some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state 
that if I dined out occasionally, as I always 
had done, and I trust shall have opportunities 
to do again, it was frequently to the detriment 
of my domestic arrangements. But the dining 
out, being, as I have stated, a constant element, 
does not in the least affect a comparative state- 
ment like this. 

I learned from my two years' experience that 



ECONOMY 79 

it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain 
one's necessary food, even in this latitude; that 
a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, 
and yet retain health and strength. I have made 
a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several 
accounts, simply off a dish of purslane {Portu- 
laca oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, 
boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account 
of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray 
what more can a reasonable man desire, in 
peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a suffi- 
cient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, 
with the addition of salt ? Even the little variety 
which I used was a yielding to the demands of 
appetite, and not of health. Yet men have 
come to such a pass that they frequently starve, 
not for want of necessaries, but for want of 
luxuries ; and I know a good woman who thinks 
that her son lost his life because he took to 
drinking water only. 

The reader will perceive that I am treating 
the subject rather from an economic than a 
dietetic point of view, and he will not venture 
to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he 
has a well-stocked larder. 

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal 
and salt, genuine hoe-cakes, which I baked 
before my fire out of doors on a shingle or the 
end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my 
house; but it was wont to get smoked and to 



80 WALDEN 

have a piny flavor. I tried flour also ; but have 
at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal 
most convenient and agreeable. In cold weather 
it was no little amusement to bake several small 
loaves of this in succession, tending and turning 
them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching 
eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I 
ripened, and they had to my senses a fragrance 
like that of other noble fruits, which I kept in 
as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. 
I made a study of the ancient and indispen- 
sable art of bread-making, consulting such au- 
thorities as offered, going back to the primitive 
days and first invention of the unleavened kind, 
when from the wildness of nuts and meats men 
first reached the mildness and refinement of 
this diet, and travelling gradually down in my 
studies through that accidental souring of the 
dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening 
process, and through the various fermentations 
thereafter, till I came to **good, sweet, whole- 
some bread," the staff of life. Leaven, which 
some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus which 
fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously pre- 
served like the vestal fire, — some precious 
bottle-full, I suppose, first brought over in the 
Mayflower, did the business for America, and 
its influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, 
in cerealian billows over the land, — this seed 
I regularly and faithfully procured from the 



ECONOMY 81 

village, till at length one morning I forgot the 
rules, and scalded my yeast; by which accident 
I discovered that even this was not indispensable, 

— for my discoveries were not by the synthetic 
but analytic process, — and I have gladly 
omitted it since, though most housewives ear- 
nestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread 
without yeast might not be, and elderly people 
prophesied a speedy decay of the vital forces. 
Yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient, 
and after going without it for a year am still 
in the land of the living; and I am glad to 
escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle-full 
in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and 
discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It 
is simpler and more respectable to omit it. Man 
is an animal who more than any other can adapt 
himself to all climates and circumstances. 
Neither did I put any sal soda, or other acid 
or alkali, into my bread. It would seem that 
I made it according to the recipe which Marcus 
Porcius Cato gave about two centuries before 
Christ. '*Panem depsticium sic facito. Manus 
mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mor- 
tarium indito, aquae paulatim addito, subigito- 
que pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris, defingito, 
coquitoque sub testu." Which I take to mean 

— "Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your 
hands and trough well. Put the meal into the 
trough, add water gradually, and knead it 



82 WALDEN 

thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, 
mould it, and bake it under a cover," that is, 
in a baking-kettle. Not a word about leaven. 
But I did not always use this staff of life. At 
one time, owing to the emptiness of my purse, 
I saw none of it for more than a month. 

Every New Englander might easily raise all 
his own breadstuff s in this land of rye and Indian 
corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating 
markets for them. Yet so far are we from 
simplicity and independence that, in Concord, 
fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, 
and hominy and corn in a still coarser form 
are hardly used by any. For the most part the 
farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of 
his own producing, and buys flour, which is at 
least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at 
the store. I saw that I could easily raise my 
bushel or two of rye and Indian corn, for the 
former will grow on the poorest land, and the 
latter does not require the best, and grind them 
in a hand-mill, and so do without rice and 
pork; and if I must have some concentrated 
sweet, I found by experiment that I could make 
a very good molasses either of pumpkins or 
beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out 
a few maples to obtain it more easily still, and 
while these were growing I could use various 
substitutes besides those which I have named. 
"For," as the Forefathers sang, — 



ECONOMY 83 

"we can make liquor to sweeten our lips 
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips." 

Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to 
obtain this might be a fit occasion for a visit to 
the seashore, or, if I did without it altogether, 
I should probably drink the less water. I do 
not learn that the Indians ever troubled them- 
selves to go after it. 

Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far 
as my food was concerned, and having a shelter 
already, it w^ould only remain to get clothing 
and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear 
were woven in a farmer's family, — thank 
Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; 
for I think the fall from the farmer to the opera- 
tive as great and memorable as that from the 
man to the farmer ; — and in a new country 
fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I 
were not permitted still to squat, I might pur- 
chase one acre at the same price for which the 
land I cultivated was sold — namely, eight 
dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I con- 
sidered that I enhanced the value of the land by 
squatting on it. 

There is a certain class of unbelievers who 
sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think 
that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to 
strike at the root of the matter at once, — for 
the root is faith, — I am accustomed to answer 
such, that I can live on board nails. If they 



84 WALDEN 

cannot understand that, they cannot under- 
stand much that I have to say. For my part, 
I am glad to hear of experiments of this kind 
being tried; as that a young man tried for a 
fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, 
using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel 
tribe tried the same and succeeded. The human 
race is interested in these experiments, though 
a few old women who are incapacitated for 
them, or who own their thirds in mills, may be 
alarmed. 

My furniture, part of which I made myself, 
and the rest cost me nothing of which I have 
not rendered an account, consisted of a bed, a 
table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass three 
inches in diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, 
a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a dipper, a 
wash-bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, 
one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for mo- 
lasses, and a japanned lamp. None is so poor 
that he need sit on a pumpkin. That is shift- 
lessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I 
like best in the village garrets to be had for tak- 
ing them away. Furniture ! Thank God, I can 
sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture 
warehouse. What man but a philosopher would 
not be ashamed to see his furniture packed in a 
cart and going up country 'exposed to the light 
of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly ac- 



ECONOMY 85 

count of empty boxes? That is Spaulding's 
furniture. I could never tell from inspecting 
such a load whether it belonged to a so-called 
rich man or a poor one; the owner always 
seemed poverty-stricken. Indeed, the more 
you have of such things the poorer you are. 
Each load looks as if it contained the contents 
of a dozen shanties; and if one shanty is poor, 
this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what 
do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, 
our exuviae; at last to go from this world to 
another newly furnished, and leave this to be 
burned.? It is the same as if all these traps 
were buckled to a man's belt, and he could not 
move over the rough country where our lines 
are cast without dragging them, — dragging his 
trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in 
the trap. The muskrat will gnaw his third leg 
off to be free. No wonder man has lost his 
elasticity. How often he is at a dead set ! "Sir, 
if I may be so bold, what do you mean by a 
dead set.?" If you are a seer, whenever you 
meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, 
and much that he pretends to disown, behind 
him, even to his kitchen furniture and all the 
trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and 
he will appear to be harnessed to it and making 
what headway he can. I think that the man 
is at a dead set who has got through a knot hole 
or gateway where his sledge load of furniture 



86 WALDEN 

cannot follow him. I cannot but feel compas- 
sion when I hear some trig, compact-looking 
man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak 
of his ** furniture," as whether it is insured or 
not. "But what shall I do with my furniture.^" 
My gay butterfly is entangled in a spider's web 
then. Even those who seem for a long while 
not to have any, if you inquire more narrowly 
you will find have some stored in somebody's 
barn. I look upon England to-day as an old 
gentleman who is travelling with a great deal 
of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated 
from long housekeeping, which he has not the 
courage to burn ; great trunk, little trunk, band- 
box, and bundle. Throw away the first three 
at least. It would surpass the powers of a well 
man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, 
and I should certainly advise a sick one to lay 
down his bed and run. When I have met an 
immigrant tottering under a bundle which con- 
tained his all — looking like an enormous wen 
which had grown out of the nape of his neck — 
I have pitied him, not because that was his all, 
but because he had all that he could carry. If 
I have got to drag my trap, I will take care that 
it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital 
part. But perchance it would be wisest never 
to put one's paw into it. 

I would observe, by the way, that it costs me 
nothing for curtains, for I have no gazers to shut 



ECONOMY 87 

out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that 
they should look in. The moon will not sour 
milk nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun 
injure my furniture or fade my carpet, and if he 
is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still 
better economy to retreat behind some cur- 
tain which nature has provided, than to add 
a single item to the details of housekeeping. 
A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had 
no room to spare within the house, nor time to 
spare within or without to shake it, I declined 
it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before 
my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of 
evil. 

Not long since I was present at the auction of 
a deacon's effects, for his life had not been 
ineffectual : — 

"The evil that men do lives after them.*' 

As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which 
had begun to accumulate in his father's day. 
Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And 
now, after lying half a century in his garret and 
other dust holes, these things were not burned; 
instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of 
them, there was an auction, or increasing 
of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to 
view them, bought them all, and carefully trans- 
ported them to their garrets and dust holes, to 
lie there till their estates are settled, when they 



88 WALDEN 

will start again. When a man dies he kicks 
the dust. 

The customs of some savage nations might, 
perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they 
at least go through the semblance of casting their 
slough annually ; they have the idea of the thing, 
whether they have the reality or not. Would it 
not be well if we were to celebrate such a "busk," 
or *' feast of first fruits," as Bartram describes to 
have been the custom of the Mucclasse Indians ? 
"Wlien a town celebrates the busk," says he, 
'* having previously provided themselves with 
new clothes, new pots, pans, and other house- 
hold utensils and furniture, they collect all their 
worn-out clothes and other despicable things, 
sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the 
whole town, of their filth, which with all the 
remaining grain and other old provisions they 
cast together into one common heap, and con- 
sume it with fire. After having taken medicine, 
and fasted for three days, all the fire in the town is 
extinguished. During this fast they abstain from 
the gratification of every appetite and passion 
whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed ; all 
malefactors may return to their town. . . . 

"On the fourth morning, the high priest, by 
rubbing dry wood together, produces new fire in 
the public square, from whence every habitation 
in the town is supplied with the new and pure 
flame." 



ECONOMY 89 

They then feast on the new corn and fruits 
and dance and sing for three days, '*and the 
four following days they receive visits and re- 
joice with their friends from neighboring towns 
who have in like manner purified and prepared 
themselves." 

The Mexicans also practised a similar purifi- 
cation at the end of every fifty-two years, in the 
belief that it was time for the world to come to 
an end. 

I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, 
that is, as the dictionary defines it, *' outward and 
visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace," 
than this, and I have no doubt that they were 
originally inspired directly from heaven to do 
thus, though they have no Biblical record of the 
revelation. 

For more than five years I maintained myself 
thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found 
that by working about six weeks in a year, I 
could meet all the expenses of living. The whole 
of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I 
had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly 
tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses 
were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, 
to my income, for I was obliged to dress and 
train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, 
and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not 
teach for the good of my fellow-men, but simply 



90 WALDEN 

for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried 
trade; but I found that it would take ten years 
to get under way in that, and that then I should 
probably be on my way to the devil. I was 
actually afraid that I might by that time be 
doing what is called a good business. When for- 
merly I was looking about to see what I could 
do for a living, some sad experience in conform- 
ing to the wishes of friends being fresh in my 
mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and 
seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely 
I could do, and its small profits might suflace, — 
for my greatest skill has been to want but little, 
— so little capital it required, so little distraction 
from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. 
While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into 
trade or the professions, I contemplated this occu- 
pation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all 
summer to pick the berries which came in my 
way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; 
so, to keep the flocks of Admetus. I also dreamed 
that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry ever- 
greens to such villagers as loved to be reminded 
of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. 
But I have since learned that trade curses 
everything it handles; and though you trade in 
messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade 
attaches to the business. 

As I preferred some things to others, and espe- 
cially valued my freedom, as I could fare hard 



ECONOMY 91 

and yet succeed well, I did not wish to spend my 
time in earning rich carpets or other fine furni- 
ture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the Gre- 
cian or the Gothic style just yet. If there are 
any to whom it is no interruption to acquire 
these things, and who know how to use them 
when acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit. 
Some are "industrious," and appear to love 
labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it 
keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I 
have at present nothing to say. Those who would 
not know what to do with more leisure than they 
now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard 
as they do, — work till they pay for themselves, 
and get their free papers. For myself I found 
that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most 
independent of any, especially as it required only 
thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The 
laborer's day ends with the going down of the 
sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his 
chosen pursuit, independent of his labor ; but his 
employer, who speculates from month to month, 
has no respite from one end of the year to the 
other. 

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and 
experience, that to maintain one's self on this 
earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will 
live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the 
simpler nations are still the sports of the more 
artificial. It is not necessary that a man should 



92 WALDEN 

earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless 
he sweats easier than I do. 

One young man of my acquaintance, who has 
inherited some acres, told me that he thought he 
should live as I did, if he had the means. I 
would not have any one adopt my mode of liv- 
ing on any account ; for, besides that before he 
has fairly learned it I may have found out an- 
other for myself, I desire that there may be as 
many different persons in the world as possible ; 
but I would have each one be very careful to find 
out and pursue his own way, and not his father's 
or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The 
youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not 
be hindered from doing that which he tells me 
he would like to do. It is by a mathematical 
point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the 
fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but 
that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We 
may not arrive at our port within a calculable 
period, but we would preserve the true course. 

Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one 
is truer still for a thousand, as a large house is not 
proportionally more expensive than a small one, 
since one roof may cover, one cellar underlie, 
and one wall separate several apartments. But 
for my part, I preferred the solitary dwelling. 
Moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to build 
the whole yourself than to convince another of 
the advantage of the common wall; and when 




A glunpse of Walden 



ECONOMY 93 

you have done this, the common partition, to be 
much cheaper, must be a thin one, and that other 
may prove a bad neighbor, and also not keep 
his side in repair. The only cooperation which 
is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and 
superficial ; and what little true cooperation 
there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony 
inaudible to men. If a man has faith he will co- 
operate with equal faith everywhere; if he has 
not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of 
the world, whatever company he is joined to. 
To cooperate, in the highest as well as the lowest 
sense, means to get our living together, I heard 
it proposed lately that two young men should 
travel together over the world, the one without 
money, earning his means as he went, before the 
mast and behind the plough, the other carrying 
a bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to 
see that they could not long be companions or 
cooperate, since one would not operate at all. 
They would part at the first interesting crisis 
in their adventures. Above all, as I have im- 
plied, the man who goes alone can start to-day; 
but he who travels with another must wait till 
that other is ready, and it may be a long time 
before they get off. 

But all this is very selfish, I have heard some 
of my townsmen say. I confess that I have 
hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic 



94 WALDEN 

enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a 
sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed 
this pleasure also. There are those who have 
used all their arts to persuade me to undertake 
the support of some poor family in the town ; and 
if I had nothing to do, — for the devil finds em- 
ployment for the idle, — I might try my hand at 
some such pastime as that. However, when I 
have thought to indulge myself in this respect, 
and lay their Heaven under an obligation by 
maintaining certain poor persons in all respects 
as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have 
even ventured so far as to make them the offer, 
they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred 
to remain poor. Wliile my townsmen and women 
are devoted in so many ways to the good of their 
fellows, I trust that one at least may be spared 
to other and less humane pursuits. You must 
have a genius for charity as well as for anything 
else. As for Doing-good, that is one of the pro- 
fessions which are full. Moreover, I have tried 
it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satis- 
fied that it does not agree with my constitution. 
Probably I should not consciously and deliber- 
ately forsake my particular calling to do the 
good which society demands of me, to save the 
universe from annihilation ; and I believe that a 
like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere 
is all that now preserves it. But I would not 
stand between any man and his genius; and to 



ECONOMY 95 

him who does this work, which I dedine, with 
his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, 
Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as 
it is most likely they will. 

I am far from supposing that my case is a 
peculiar one; no doubt many of my readers 
would make a similar defence. At doing some- 
thing, — I will not engage that my neighbors 
shall pronounce it good, — I do not hesitate to 
say that I should be a capital fellow to hire; 
but what that is, it is for my employer to find 
out. What good I do, in the common sense of 
that w^ord, must be aside from my main path, 
and for the most part wholly unintended. Men 
say, practically. Begin where you are and such 
as you are, without aiming mainly to become of 
more worth, and with kindness aforethought go 
about doing good. If I were to preach at all in 
this strain, I should say rather. Set about being 
good. As if the sun should stop when he has 
kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or 
a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like 
a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cot- 
tage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting 
meats, and making darkness visible, instead of 
steadily increasing his genial heat and benefi- 
cence till he is of such brightness that no mortal 
can look him in the face, and then, and in the 
meanwhile too, going about the world in his own 
orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philoso- 



96 WALDEN 

phy has discovered, the world going about him 
getting good. When Phaeton, wishing to prove 
his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the 
sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the 
beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses 
in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the 
surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, 
and made the great desert of Sahara, till at length 
Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a 
thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his 
death, did not shine for a year. 

There is no odor so bad as that which arises 
from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, 
carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man 
was coming to my house with the conscious de- 
sign of doing me good, I should run for my life, 
as from that dry and parching wind of the Afri- 
can deserts called the simoom, which fills the 
mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till 
you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some 
of his good done to me, — some of its virus 
mingled with my blood. No, — in this case I 
would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man 
is not a good man to me because he will feed me if 
I should be starving, or warm me if I should be 
freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should 
ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfound- 
land dog that will do as much. Philanthropy 
is not love for one's fellow-man in the broadest 
sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly 



ECONOMY 97 

kind and worthy man in his way, and has his 
reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are 
a hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy 
do not help us in our best estate, when we are 
most worthy to be helped ? I never heard of a 
philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely 
proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me. 

The Jesuits were quite balked by those In- 
dians who, being burned at the stake, suggested 
new modes of torture to their tormentors. Being 
superior to physical suffering, it sometimes 
chanced that they were superior to any conso- 
lation which the missionaries could offer; and 
the law to do as you would be done by fell with 
less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for 
their part, did not care how they were done by, 
who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and 
came very near freely forgiving them all they did. 

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they 
most need, though it be your example which 
leaves them far behind. If you give money, 
spend yourself with it, and do not merely aban- 
don it to them. We make curious mistakes 
sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold 
and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. 
It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfor- 
tune. If you give him money, he will perhaps 
buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the 
clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, 
in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shiv- 



98 WALDEN 

ered in my more tidy and somewhat more fash- 
ionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one 
who had slipped into the water came to my 
house to warm him, and I saw him strip off three 
pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he 
got down to the skin, though they were dirty and 
ragged enough, it is true, and that he could af- 
ford to refuse the extra garments which I offered 
him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking 
was the very thing he needed. Then I began to 
pity myself, and I saw that it would be a greater 
charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a 
whole slop-shop on him. There are a thousand 
hacking at the branches of evil to one who is 
striking at the root, and it may be that he who 
bestows the largest amount of time and money on 
the needy is doing the most by his mode of life 
to produce that misery which he strives in vain 
to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting 
the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sun- 
day's liberty for the rest. Some show their kind- 
ness to the poor by employing them in their 
kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they em- 
ployed themselves there ? You boast of spend- 
ing a tenth part of your income in charity; 
maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and 
done with it. Society recovers only a tenth part 
of the property then. Is this owing to the gener- 
osity of him in whose possession it is found, or 
to the remissness of the officers of justice? 



ECONOMY 99 

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which 
is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, 
it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness 
which overrates it. A robust poor man, one 
sunny day here in Concord, praised a fellow- 
townsman to me, because, as he said, he was 
kind to the poor; meaning himself. The kind 
uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed 
than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I 
once heard a reverend lecturer on England, a man 
of learning and intelligence, after enumerating 
her scientific, literary, and political worthies, 
Shakspeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton, 
and others, speak next of her Christian heroes, 
whom, as if his profession required it of him, he 
elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the 
greatest of the great. They were Penn, Howard, 
and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the false- 
hood and cant of this. The last were not Eng- 
land's best men and women ; only, perhaps, her 
best philanthropists. 

I would not subtract anything from the praise 
that is due to philanthropy, but merely de- 
mand justice for all who by their lives and works 
are a blessing to mankind. I do not value 
chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence, 
which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those 
plants of whose greenness withered we make 
herb tea for the sick, serve but a humble use, 
and are most employed by quacks. I want the 



100 WALDEN 

flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance 
be wafted over from him to me, and some ripe- 
ness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must 
not be a partial and transitory act, but a con- 
stant superfluity, which costs him nothing and 
of which he is unconscious. This is a charity 
which hides a multitude of sins. The philan- 
thropist too often surrounds mankind with the 
remembrance of his own cast-off griefs as an 
atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should 
impart our courage, and not our despair, our 
health and ease, and not our disease, and take 
care that this does not spread by contagion. 
From what southern plains comes up the voice 
of wailing.^ Under what latitudes reside the 
heathen to whom we would send light.? Who 
is that intemperate and brutal man whom w^e 
would redeem ? If anything ail a man, so that 
he does not perform his functions, if he have a 
pain in his bowels even, — for that is the seat of 
sympathy, — he forthwith sets about reforming 
— the world. Being a microcosm himself, he 
discovers, and it is a true discovery, and he is 
the man to make it, — that the world has been 
eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the 
globe itself is a great green apple, which there is 
danger awful to think of that the children of 
men will nibble before it is ripe; and straight- 
way his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Es- 
quimau and the Patagonian, and embraces the 



ECONOMY 101 

populous Indian and Chinese villages ; and thus, 
by a few years of philanthropic activity, the 
powers in the meanwhile using him for their 
own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dys- 
pepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one 
or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to 
be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once 
more sweet and wholesome to live. I never 
dreamed of any enormity greater than I have 
committed. I never knew, and never shall 
know, a worse man than myself. 

I believe that what so saddens the reformer 
is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, 
but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his 
private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring 
come to him, the morning rise over his couch, 
and he will forsake his generous companions 
without apology. My excuse for not lecturing 
against the use of tobacco is that I never chewed 
it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco 
chewers have to pay; though there are things 
enough I have chewed, which I could lecture 
against. If you should ever be betrayed into 
any of these philanthropies, do not let your left 
hand know what your right hand does, for it is 
not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning and 
tie your shoe-strings. Take your time, and set 
about some free labor. 

Our manners have been corrupted by com- 
munication with the saints. Our hymn-books 



102 WALDEN 

resound with a melodious cursing of God and 
enduring him forever. One would say that even 
the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled 
the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. 
There is nowhere recorded a simple and irre- 
pressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any 
memorable praise of God. All health and suc- 
cess does me good, however far off and withdrawn 
it may appear; all disease and failure helps to 
make me sad and does me evil, however much 
sympathy it may have with me or I with it. If, 
then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly 
Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let 
us first be as simple and well as Nature our- 
selves, dispel the clouds which hang over our 
own brows, and take up a little life into our 
pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, 
but endeavor to become one of the worthies of 
the world. 

I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of 
Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that "They asked a wise 
man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees 
which the Most High God has created lofty and 
umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, ex- 
cepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what 
mystery is there in this ? He replied : Each has 
its appropriate produce, and appointed season, 
during the continuance of which it is fresh and 
blooming, and during their absence dry and 
withered; to neither of which states is the cy- 



ECONOMY 103 

press exposed, being always flourishing; and of 
this nature are the azads, or religious independ- 
ents. — Fix not thy heart on that which is tran- 
sitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to 
flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is 
extinct : if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the 
date tree ; but if it affords nothing to give away, 
be an azad, or free man, like the cypress." 



COMPLEMENTAL VERSES 

THE PRETENSIONS OF POVERTY 

*'Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch, 

To claim a station in the firmament, 

Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub, 

Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue 

In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs. 

With roots and pot-herbs ; where thy right hand. 

Tearing those humane passions from the mind. 

Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish, 

Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense. 

And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone. 

We not require the dull society 

Of your necessitated temperance. 

Or that unnatural stupidity 

That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd 

Falsely exalted passive fortitude 

Above the active. This low abject brood. 

That fix their seats in mediocrity. 

Become your servile minds; but we advance 

Such virtues only as admit excess. 

Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence. 

All-seeing prudence, magnanimity 

That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue 

For which antiquity hath left no name. 

But patterns only, such as Hercules, 

Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath'd cell; 

And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere. 

Study to know but what those worthies were." 

T. Carew. 



II 

WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR 

AT a certain season of our life we are ac- 
customed to consider every spot as the 
possible site of a house. I have thus sur- 
veyed the country on every side within a dozen 
miles of where I live. In imagination I have 
bough,t all the farms in succession, for all were 
to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked 
over each farmer's premises, tasted his wild 
apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took 
his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging 
it to him in my mind; even put a higher price 
on it, — took everything but a deed of it, — 
took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to 
talk, — cultivated it, and him too to some ex- 
tent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed 
it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This 
experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort 
of real-estate broker by my friends. Wlierever 
I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radi- 
ated from me accordingly. What is a house but 
a sedes, a seat ? — better if a country seat. I 
discovered many a site for a house not likely to 
be soon improved, which some might have 



106 WALDEN 

thought too far from the village, but to my eyes 
the village was too far from it. Well, there I 
miight live, I said; and there I did live, for an 
hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I 
could let the years run off, buffet the winter 
through, and see the spring come in. The future 
inhabitants of this region, wherever they may 
place their houses, may be sure that they have 
been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay 
out the land into orchard, woodlot, and pasture, 
and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be 
left to stand before the door, and whence each 
blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage ; 
and then I let it lie, fallow perchance, for a man 
is rich in proportion to the number of things 
which he can afford to let alone. 

My imagination carried me so far that I even 
had the refusal of several farms, — the refusal 
was all I wanted, — but I never got my fingers 
burned by actual possession. The nearest that 
I came to actual possession was when I bought 
the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my 
seeds, and collected materials with which to 
make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; 
but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his 
wife — every man has such a wife — changed 
her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered 
me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak 
the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and 
it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that 



WHERE I LIVED 107 

man who had ten cents, or who had a farm, or 
ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him 
keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had 
carried it far enough ; or rather, to be generous, 
I sold him the farm for just what I gave for it, 
and, as he was not a rich man, made him a 
present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, 
and seeds, and materials for a wheelbarrow left. 
I found thus that I had been a rich man with- 
out any damage to my property. But I retained 
the landscape, and I have since annually carried 
off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With 
respect to landscapes, — 

"I am monarch of all I survey ^ 
My right there is none to dispute." 

I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, hav- 
ing enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, 
while the crusty farmer supposed that he had 
got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner 
does not know it for many years when a poet has 
put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind 
of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, 
milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, 
and left the farmer only the skimmed milk. 

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to 
me, were: its complete retirement, being about 
two miles from the village, half a mile from the 
nearest neighbor, and separated from the high- 
way by a broad field ; its bounding on the river. 



108 WALDEN 

which the owner said protected it by its fogs from 
frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to 
me ; the gray color and ruinous state of the house 
and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put 
such an interval between me and the last occu- 
pant ; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, 
gnawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neigh- 
bors I should have; but above all, the recollec- 
tion I had of it from my earliest voyages up the 
river, when the house was concealed behind a 
dense grove of red maples, through which I 
heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to 
buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out 
some rocks, cutting down the hollow apple trees, 
and grubbing up some young birches which had 
sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made 
any more of his improvements. To enjoy these 
advantages I was ready to carry it on; like At- 
las, to take the world on my shoulders, — I 
never heard what compensation he received for 
that, — and do all those things which had no 
other motive or excuse but that I might pay for 
it and be unmolested in my possession of it ; for 
I knew all the while that it would yield the most 
abundant crop of the kind I wanted if I could 
only afford to let it alone. But it turned out as 
I have said. 

All that I could say, then, with respect to 
farming on a large scale (I have always culti- 
vated a garden), was that I had had my seeds 



WHERE I LIVED 109 

ready. Many think that seeds improve with 
ao-e. I have no doubt that time discriminates 
between the good and the bad: and when at 
last I shall plant, I shall be less Hkely to be dis- 
appointed. But I would say to my fellows, once 
for all. As long as possible live free and uncom- 
mitted. It makes but little difference whether 
you are committed to a farm or the county jail. 
Old Cato, whose *'De Re Rustica" is my 
*' cultivator," says, and the only translation I 
have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage, 
"When you think of getting a farm, turn it thus 
in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor spare 
your pains to look at it, and do not think it 
enough to go round it once. The oftener you 
go there the more it will please you, if it is good." 
I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round 
and round it ag long as I live, and be buried 
in it first, that it mjiy please me the more at 
last. 

The present was my next experiment of this 
kind, which I purpose to describe more at 
length; for convenience, putting the experience 
of two years into one. As I have said, I do 
not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to 
brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, 
standing on his roost, if only to wake my neigh- 
bors up. 

Wlien first I took up my abode in the woods, 



no WALDEN 

that is, began to spend my nights as well as days 
there, which, by accident, was on Independence 
Day, or the fourth of July, 1845, my house was 
not finished for winter, but was merely a de- 
fence against the rain, without plastering or 
chimney, the walls being of rough weather- 
stained boards, with wide chinks, which made 
it cool at night. The upright white hewn studs 
and freshly planed door and window casings 
gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the 
morning, when its timbers were saturated with 
dew, so that I fancied that by noon some sweet 
gum would exude from them. To my imagina- 
tion it retained throughout the day more or less 
of this auroral character, reminding me of a cer- 
tain house on a mountain which I had visited 
the year before. This was an airy and unplas- 
tered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and 
where a goddess might trail her garments. The 
winds which passed over my dwelling were such 
as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing 
the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of 
terrestrial music. The morning wind forever 
blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; 
but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is 
but the outside of the earth everywhere. 

The only house I had been the owner of be- 
fore, if I except a boat, was a tent, which I 
used occasionally when making excursions in 
the summer, and this is still rolled up in my 



WHERE I LIVED 111 

garret; but the boat, after passing from hand 
to hand, has gone down the stream of time. 
With this more substantial shelter about me, 
I had made some progress toward setthng in the 
world. This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort 
of crystallization around me, and reacted on the 
builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a pic- 
ture in outlines. I did not need to go out doors 
to take the air, for the atmosphere within had 
lost none of its freshness. It was not so much 
within doors as behind a door where I sat, even 
in the rainiest weather. The Harivansa says, 
*'An abode without birds is like a meat without 
seasoning." Such was not my abode, for I 
found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; 
not by having imprisoned one, but having caged 
myself near them. I was not only nearer to 
some of those which commonly frequent the 
garden and the orchard, but to those wilder 
and more thrilling songsters of the forest 
which never, or rarely, serenade a villager, — 
the wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, 
the field-sparrow, the whippoorwill, and many 
others. 

I was seated by the shore of a small pond, 
about a mile and a half south of the village of 
Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the 
midst of an extensive wood between that town 
and Lincoln, and about two miles south of that 
our only field known to fame. Concord Battle 



112 WALDEN 

Ground ; but I was so low in the woods that the 
opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, 
covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. 
For the first week, whenever I looked out on the 
pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the 
side of a mountain, its bottom far above the sur- 
face of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw 
it throwing off its mighty clothing of mist, and 
here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its 
smooth reflecting surface were revealed, while 
the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdraw- 
ing in every direction into the woods, as at the 
breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The 
very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later 
into the day than usual, as on the sides of 
mountains. 

This small lake was of most value as a neigh- 
bor in the intervals of a gentle rain storm in 
August, when, both air and water being per- 
fectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon 
had all the serenity of evening, and the wood- 
thrush sang around, and was heard from shore 
to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than 
at such a time; and the clear portion of the air 
above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, 
the water, full of light and reflections, becomes 
a lower heaven itself so much the more im- 
portant. From a hill top near by, where the 
wood had recently been cut off, there was a 
pleasing vista southward across the pond. 







5s. 



WHERE I LIVED 113 

through a wide indentation in the hills which 
form the shore there, where their opposite sides 
sloping toward each other suggested a stream 
flowing out in that direction through a wooded 
valley, but stream there was none. That way I 
looked between and over the near green hills to 
some distant and higher ones in the horizon, 
tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tip- 
toe I could catch a glimpse of some of the peaks 
of the still bluer and more distant mountain 
ranges in the northwest, those true-blue coins 
from heaven's own mint, and also of some por- 
tion of the village. But in other directions, even 
from this point, I could not see over or beyond 
the woods which surrounded me. It is well to 
have some water in your neighborhood, to give 
buoyancy to and float the earth. One value 
even of the smallest well is that when you look 
into it you see that the earth is not continent but 
insular. This is as important as that it keeps 
butter cool. When I looked across the pond 
from this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, 
which in time of flood I distinguished elevated 
perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley, 
like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the 
pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and 
floated even by this small sheet of intervening 
water, and I was reminded that this on which I 
dwelt was but dry land. 

Though the view from my door was still more 



114 WALDEN 

contracted, I did not feel crowded or confined 
in the least. There was pasture enough for my 
imagination. The low shrub-oak plateau to 
which the opposite shore arose, stretched away 
toward the prairies of the West and the steppes 
of Tartary, affording ample room for all the rov- 
ing families of men. '* There are none happy in 
the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast 
horizon," — said Damodara, when his herds 
required new and larger pastures. 

Both place and time were changed and I 
dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and 
to those eras in history which had most at- 
tracted me. Where I live was as far off as many 
a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We 
are wont to imagine rare and delectable places 
in some remote and more celestial corner of the 
system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's 
Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I dis- 
covered that my house actually had its site in 
such a withdrawn, but forever new and unpro- 
faned, part of the universe. If it were worth the 
while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades 
or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I 
was really there, or at an equal remoteness from 
the life which I had left behind, dwindled and 
twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neigh- 
bor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by 
him. Such was that part of creation where I had 
squatted : — 



WHERE I LIVED 115 

** There was a shepherd that did live, 
And held his thoughts as high 
As were the mounts whereon his flocks 
Did hourly feed him by." 

What should we think of the shepherd's life if 
his flocks always wandered to higher pastures 
than his thoughts ? 

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to 
make my life of equal simplicity, and I may 
say innocence, with Nature herself. I have 
been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the 
Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond ; 
that was a religious exercise, and one of the 
best things which I did. They say that char- 
acters were engraven on the bathing tub of king 
Telling- thang to this effect: "Renew thyself 
completely each day; do it again, and again, 
and forever again." I can understand that. 
Morning brings back the heroic ages. I was as 
much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito 
making its invisible and unimaginable tour 
through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I 
was sitting with door and windows open, as I 
could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. 
It was Homer's requiem ; itself an Iliad and 
Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and 
wanderings. There was something cosmical 
about it ; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, 
of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. 
The morning, which is the most memorable 



116 WALDEN 

season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then 
there is least somnolence in us ; and for an hour, 
at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers 
all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be 
expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to 
which we are not awakened by our Genius, but 
by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, 
are not awakened by our own newly acquired 
force and aspirations from within, accompanied 
by the undulations of celestial music, instead of 
factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air — 
to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and 
thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself 
to be good, no less than the light. That man 
who does not believe that each day contains 
an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than 
he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and 
is pursuing a descending and darkening way. 
After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, 
the soul of man, or its orgp^ns rather, are rein- 
vigorated each day, and his Genius tries again 
what noble life it can make. All memorable 
events, I should say, transpire in morning time 
and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, 
"All intelligences awake with the morning.'' 
Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memo- 
rable of the actions of men, date from such an 
hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are 
the children of Aurora, and emit their music 
at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous 



WHERE I LIVED 117 

thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a 
perpetual morning. It matters not what the 
clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. 
INIorning is when I am awake and there is a 
dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw 
off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an 
account of their day if they have not been slum- 
bering ? They are not such poor calculators. 
If they had not been overcome with drowsiness 
they would have performed something. The 
millions are awake enough for physical labor; 
but only one in a million is awake enough for 
effective intellectual exertion, only one in a 
hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To 
be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met 
a man who was quite awake. How could I have 
looked him in the face ? 

We must learn to reawaken and keep our- 
selves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by 
an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does 
not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know 
of no more encouraging fact than the unques- 
tionable ability of man to elevate his life by a 
conscious endeavor. It is something to be able 
to paint a particular picture, or to carve a 
statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful ; 
but it is far more glorious to carve and paint 
the very atmosphere and medium through w^iich 
we look, which morally we can do. To effect 
the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. 



118 WALDEN 

Every man is tasked to make his life, even in 
its details, worthy of the contemplation of his 
most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, 
or rather used up, such paltry information as we 
get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how 
this might be done. ) 

I went to the woods because I wished to live 
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of 
life, and see if I could not learn what it had to 
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover 
that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what 
was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish 
to practise resignation, unless it was quite 
necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out 
all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and 
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not 
life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to 
drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its 
lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why 
then to get the whole and genuine meanness of 
it, and publish its meanness to the world; or 
if it were sublime, to know it by experience, 
and be able to give a true account of it in my 
next excursion. For most men, it appears to 
me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, 
whether it is of the devil or of God, and have 
somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief 
end of man here to ''glorify God and enjoy him 
forever." 

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the 



WHERE I LIVED 119 

fable tells us that we were long ago changed 
into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; 
it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and 
our best virtue has for its occasion a superflu- 
ous and evitable wretchedness. Our Ufe is 
frittered away by detail. An honest man has 
hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, 
or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, 
and lump the rest. Simplicity, simpUcity, 
simplicity ! I say, let your affairs be as two or 
three, and not a hundred or a thousand ; instead 
of a million count half a dozen, and keep your 
accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of 
this chopping sea of civiUzed fife, such are the 
clouds and storms arid quicksands and thousand- 
and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has 
to live, if he would not founder and go to the 
bottom and not make his port at all, by dead 
reckoning, and he must be a great calculator 
indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. In- 
stead of three meals a day, if it be necessary 
eat but one ; instead of a hundred dishes, five ; 
and reduce other things in proportion. Our 
life is like a German Confederacy, made up of 
petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuat- 
ing, so that even a German cannot tell you how 
it is bounded at any moment. The nation 
itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, 
which, by the way, are all external and superfi- 
cial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown estab- 



120 WALDEN 

lishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped 
up by its ovfn traps, ruined by luxury and 
heedless expense, by want of calculation and a 
worthy aim, as the million households in the 
land ; and the only cure for it as for them is in 
a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan 
simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It 
lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that 
the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and 
talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles 
an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or 
not; but whether we should live like baboons 
or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not 
get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote 
days and nights to the work, but go to tinker- 
ing upon our lives to improve them, w^ho will 
build railroads.^ And if railroads are not built, 
how shall we get to heaven in season ? But if 
we stay at home and mind our business, who 
will want railroads ? We do not ride on the 
railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think 
what those sleepers are that underlie the rail- 
road ? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a 
Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and 
they are covered with sand, and the cars run 
smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, 
I assure you. And every few years a new lot 
is laid down and run over ; so that, if some have 
the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the 
misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they 



WHERE I LIVED 121 

run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a 
supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, 
and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, 
and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were 
an exception. I am glad to know that it takes 
a gang of men for every five miles to keep the 
sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, 
for this is a sign that they may sometime get up 
again. ^^^,..^ 

Why should we live with such hurry and waste 
of life .^ We are determined to be starved before 
we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time 
saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches 
to-day to save nine to-morrow. As for work, 
we have n't any of any consequence. We have 
the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly 
keep our heads still. If I should only give a 
few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, 
that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly 
a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, 
notwithstanding that press of engagements which 
was his excuse so many times this morning, nor 
a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but 
would forsake all and follow that sound, not 
mainly to save property from the flames, but, 
if we will confess the truth, much more to see 
it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, 
did not set it on fire, — or to see it put out, 
and have a hand in it, if that is done as hand- 
somely; yes, even if it were the parish church 



122 WALDEN 

itself. Hardly a man takes a half hour's nap 
after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his 
head and asks, "What's the news?" as if the 
rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some 
give directions to be waked every half hour, 
doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to 
pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. 
After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable 
as the breakfast. *'Pray tell me anything new 
that has happened to a man anywhere on this 
globe," — and he reads it over his coffee and 
rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out 
this morning on the Wachito River; never 
dreaminoj the while that he lives in the dark 
unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and 
has but the rudiment of an eye himself. 

For my part, I could easily do without the 
post-office. I think that there are very few 
important communications made through it. 
To speak critically, I never received more than 
one or two letters in my life — I wrote this some 
years ago — that were worth the postage. The 
penny-post is, commonly, an institution through 
which you seriously offer a man that penny for 
his thought which is so often safely offered in 
jest. And I am sure that I never read any 
memorable news in a newspaper. If we read 
of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by 
accident, or one house burned, or one vessel 
wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one 



WHERE I LIVED 123 

cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one 
mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in 
the winter, — w^e never need read of another. 
One is enough. If you are acquainted with the 
principle, what do you care for a myriad instances 
and applications ? To a philosopher all news, 
as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and 
read it are old women over their tea. Yet not 
a few are greedy after this gossip. There was 
such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of 
the offices to learn the foreign news by the last 
arrival, that several large squares of plate glass 
belonging to the establishment were broken by 
the pressure, — news which I seriously think 
a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve 
years beforehand with sufficient accuracy. As 
for Spain, for instance, if you know how to 
throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and Don 
Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to 
time in the right proportions, — they may have 
changed the names a little since I saw the papers, 
— and serve up a bull-fight when other enter- 
tainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and 
give us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin 
of things in Spain as the most succinct and lucid 
reports under this head in the newspapers : and 
as for England, almost the last significant scrap 
of news from that quarter was the revolution 
of 1649; and if you have learned the history of 
her crops for an average year, you never need 



124 WALDEN 

attend to that thing again, unless your specula- 
tions are of a merely pecuniary character. If 
one may judge who rarely looks into the news- 
papers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign 
parts, a French revolution not excepted. 

What news ! how much more important to 
know what that is which was never old ! " Kieou- 
he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent 
a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. 
Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated 
near him, and questioned him in these terms: 
What is your master doing.? The messenger 
answered with respect: My master desires to 
diminish the number of his faults, but he can- 
not come to the end of them. The messenger 
being gone, the philosopher remarked : What 
a worthy messenger ! What a worthy mes- 
senger!" The preacher, instead of vexing the 
ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at 
the end of the week, — for Sunday is the fit 
conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not the 
fresh and brave beginning of a new one, — with 
this one other draggletail of a sermon, should 
shout with thundering voice, — "Pause ! Avast ! 
Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow.?" 

Shams and delusions are esteemed for sound- 
est truths, while reality is fabulous. If men 
would steadily observe realities only, and not 
allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare 
it with such things as we know, would be like 



WHERE I LIVED 125 

a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertain- 
ments. If we respected only what is inevitable 
and has a right to be, music and poetry would 
resound along the streets. When we are un- 
hurried and wise, we perceive that only great 
and worthy things have any permanent and 
absolute existence, — that petty fears and petty 
pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This 
is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing 
the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be 
deceived by shows, men establish and confirm 
their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, 
which still is built on purely illusory foundations. 
Children, who play life, discern its true law and 
relations more clearly than men, who fail to 
live it worthily, but who think that they are 
wiser by experience, that is, by failure. I have 
read in a Hindoo book that "There was a king's 
son, who, being expelled in infancy from his 
native city, was brought up by a forester, and, 
growing up to maturity in that state, imagined 
himself to belong to the barbarous race with 
which he lived. One of his father's ministers 
having discovered him, revealed to him what 
he was, and the misconception of his character 
was removed, and he knew himself to be a 
prince. So soul," continues the Hindoo phil- 
osopher, "from the circumstances in which it 
is placed, mistakes its own character, until the 
truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and 



126 WALDEN 

then it knows itself to be BrahmeJ' I perceive 
that we inhabitants of New England live this 
mean life that we do because our vision does not 
penetrate the surface of things. We think that 
that is which appears to be. If a man should 
walk through this town and see only the reality, 
where, think you, would the "Mill-dam" go 
to ? If he should give us an account of the 
realities he beheld there, we should not recog- 
nize the place in his description. Look at a 
meeting-house, or a court-house, or a jail, or a 
shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that 
thing really is before a true gaze, and they would 
all go to pieces in your account of them. Men 
esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the sys- 
tem, behind the farthest star, before Adam and 
after the last man. In eternity there is indeed 
something true and sublime. But all these 
times and places and occasions are now and 
here. God Himself culminates in the present 
moment, and will never be more divine in the 
lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to 
apprehend at all what is sublime and noble 
only by the perpetual instilling and drenching 
of the reality that surrounds us. The uni- 
verse constantly and obediently answers to our 
conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, 
the track is laid for us. Let us spend our 
lives in conceiving then. The poet or the art- 
ist never yet had so fair and noble a design 



WHERE I LIVED 127 

but some of his posterity at least could accom- 
plish it. 

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, 
and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell 
and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let 
us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and 
without perturbation; let company come and 
let company go, let the bells ring and the children 
cry, — determined to make a day of it. Why 
should we knock under and go with the stream ? 
Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that 
terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, 
situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this 
danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way 
is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with 
morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, 
tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine 
whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its 
pains. If the bell rings, why should we run ? 
We will consider what kind of music they are 
like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and 
wedge our feet downward through the mud 
and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradi- 
tion, and delusion and appearance, that alluvion 
which covers the globe, through Paris and 
London, through New York and Boston and 
Concord, through church and state, through 
poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come 
to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we 
can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake ; 



128 WALDEN 

and then begin, liaving a point d'appui, below 
freshet and frost and fire, a phice where you 
might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp- 
post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, 
but a Realometer, that future ages might know 
how deep a freshet of shams and appearances 
had gathered from time to time. If you stand 
right fronting and face to face to a fact, you 
will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, 
as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge 
dividing: you throuoh the heart and marrow, 
and so you will happily conclude your mortal 
career. Be it life or death, we craye only reality. 
If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in 
our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if 
we are aliye, let us go about our business. 

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I 
drink at it ; but while I drink I see the sandy 
bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin 
current slides away, but eternity remains. I 
would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bot- 
tom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. 
I know not the first letter of the alphabet, I haye 
always been reo^rettincr that I was not as wise as 
the day I was born. The intellect is a cleayer; 
it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of 
thino's. I do not wish to be any more busy with 
my hands than is necessary. My head is hands 
and feet. I feel all my best faculties concen- 
trated in it. ]\ry instinct tells me that my head 



WHERE I LIVED 129 

is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use 
their snout and fore-paws, and with it I woukl 
mine and burrow my way through these hills. 
I think that the richest vein is somewhere here- 
abouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising 
vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine. 



Ill 

READING 

WITH a little more deliberation in the 
choice of their pursuits, all men would 
perhaps become essentially students 
and observers, for certainly their nature and 
destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumu- 
lating property for ourselves or our posterity, in 
founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame 
even, we are mortal ; but in dealing with truth we 
are immortal, and need fear no change nor acci- 
dent. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philoso- 
pher raised a corner of the veil from the statue 
of the divinity; and still the trembling robe re- 
mains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as 
he did, since it was I in him that was then so 
bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the 
vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no 
time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. 
That time which we really improve, or which is 
improvable, is neither past, present, nor future. 
My residence was more favorable, not only to 
thought, but to serious reading, than a university ; 
and though I was beyond the range of the ordi- 
nary circulating library, I had more than ever 



READING 131 

come within the influence of those books which 
circulate round the world, whose sentences were 
first written on bark, and are now merely copied 
from time to time on to linen paper. Says the 
poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast, ''Being seated to 
run through the region of the spiritual world ; I 
have had this advantage in books. To be in- 
toxicated by a single glass of wine; I have ex- 
perienced this pleasure when I have drunk the 
liquor of the esoteric doctrines." I kept Homer's 
Iliad on my table through the summer, though I 
looked at his page only now and then. Inces- 
sant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my 
house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same 
time, made more study impossible. Yet I sus- 
tained myself by the prospect of such reading in 
future. I read one or two shallow books of travel 
in the intervals of my work, till that employment 
made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where 
it was then that / lived. 

The student may read Homer or iEschylus in 
the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxu- 
riousness, for it implies that he in some measure 
emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning 
hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if 
printed in the character of our mother tongue, 
will always be in a language dead to degenerate 
times ; and we must laboriously seek the meaning 
of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense 
than common use permits out of what wisdom 



132 WALDEN 

and valor and generosity we have. The modern 
cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, 
has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic 
writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and 
the letter in which they are printed as rare and 
curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youth- 
ful days and costly hours, if you learn only some 
words of an ancient language, which are raised 
out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual 
suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain 
that the farmer remembers and repeats the few 
Latin words which he has heard. Men some- 
times speak as if the study of the classics would 
at length make way for more modern and prac- 
tical studies; but the adventurous student will 
always study classics, in whatever language they 
may be written and however ancient they may 
be. For what are the classics but the noblest 
recorded thoughts of man ? They are the only 
oracles which are not decayed, and there are 
such answers to the most modern inquiry in them 
as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might 
as well omit to study Nature because she is old. 
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true 
spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task 
the reader more than any exercise which the 
customs of the day esteem. It requires a train- 
ing such as the athletes underwent, the steady 
intention almost of the whole life to this object. 
Books must be read as deliberately and reserv- 



READING 133 

edly as they were written. It is not enough even 
to be able to speak the language of that nation 
by which they are written, for there is a memo- 
rable interval between the spoken and the written 
language, the ImgUage heard and the language 
read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, 
a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and 
we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our 
mothers. The other is the maturity and experi- 
ence of that; if that is our mother tongue, this 
is our father tongue, a reserved and select ex- 
pression, too significant to be heard by the ear, 
which we must be born again in order to speak. 
The crowds of men who merely s'poke the Greek 
and Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not 
entitled by the accident of birth to read the works 
of genius written in those languages; for these 
were not written in that Greek or Latin which 
they knew, but in the select language of litera- 
ture. They had not learned the nobler dialects 
of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on 
which they were written were waste paper to 
them, and they prized instead a cheap contem- 
porary literature. But when the several nations 
of Europe had acquired distinct though rude 
written languages of their own, sufficient for the 
purposes of their rising literatures, then first learn- 
ing revived, and scholars were enabled to discern 
from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. 
What the Roman and Grecian multitude could 



134 WALDEN 

not hear, after the lapse of ages a few scholars 
read, and a few scholars only are still reading it. 

However much we may admire the orator's 
occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest 
written words are commonly as far behind or 
above the fleeting spoken language as the fir- 
mament with its stars is behind the clouds. 
There are the stars, and they who can may 
read them. The astronomers forever comment 
on and observe them. They are not exhalations 
like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. 
What is called eloquence in the forum is com- 
monly found to be rhetoric in the study. The 
orator yields to the inspiration of a transient 
occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, 
to those who can hear him ; but the writer, whose 
more equable life is his occasion, and who would 
be distracted by the event and the crowd which 
inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and 
heart of mankind, to all in any age who can un- 
derstand him. 

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad 
with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. 
A written word is the choicest of relics. It is 
something at once more intimate with us and 
more universal than any other work of art. It 
is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may 
be translated into every language, and not only 
be read but actually breathed from all human 
lips ; — not be represented on canvas or in marble 




Where Thoreau s cabin stood 



READING 135 

only, but be carved out of the breath of hfe itself. 
The symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes 
a modern man's speech. Two thousand summers 
have imparted to the monuments of Grecian lit- 
erature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden 
and autumnal tint, for they have carried their 
own serene and celestial atmosphere into all 
lands to protect them against the corrosion of 
time. Books are the treasured wealth of the 
world and the fit inheritance of generations and 
nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand 
naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every 
cottage. They have no cause of their own to 
plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the 
reader his common sense will not refuse them. 
Their authors are a natural and irresistible 
aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings 
or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. 
When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader 
has earned by enterprise and industry his cov- 
eted leisure and independence, and is admitted 
to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns in- 
evitably at last to those still higher but yet inac- 
cessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sen- 
sible only of the imperfection of his culture and 
the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and 
further proves his good sense by the pains which 
he takes to secure for his children that intellectual 
culture whose want he so keenly feels ; and thus 
it is that he becomes the founder of a family. 



136 WALDEN 

Those who have not learned to read the an- 
cient classics in the language in which they were 
written must have a very imperfect knowledge 
of the history of the human race; for it is re- 
markable that no transcript of them has ever 
been made into any modern tongue, unless our 
civilization itself may be regarded as such a 
transcript. Homer has never yet been printed 
in English, nor iEschylus, nor Virgil even, — 
works as refined, as solidly done, and as beauti- 
ful almost as the morning itself ; for later writers, 
say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if 
ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish 
and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the 
ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who 
never knew them. It will be soon enough to 
forget them when we have the learning and 
the genius which will enable us to attend to and 
appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed 
when those relics which we call Classics, and 
the still older and more than classic but even less 
known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still 
further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be 
filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, 
with Homers and Dantes and Shakspeares, and 
all the centuries to come shall have successively 
deposited their trophies in the forum of the 
world. By such a pile we may hope to scale 
heaven at last. 

The works of the great poets have never yet 



READING 137 

been read by mankind, for only great poets can 
read them. They have only been read as the 
multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, 
not astronomically. Most men have learned to 
read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have 
learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and 
not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a 
noble intellectual exercise they know little or 
nothing ; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, 
not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the 
nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we 
have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our 
most alert and wakeful hours to. 

I think that having learned our letters we 
should read the best that is in literature, and not 
be forever repeating our a b abs, and words of 
one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting 
on the lowest and foremost form all our lives, 
Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, 
and perchance have been convicted by the wis- 
dom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest 
of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties 
in what is called easy reading. There is a work 
in several volumes in our Circulating Library en- 
titled Little Reading, which I thought referred 
to a town of that name which I had not been to. 
There are those who, like cormorants and os- 
triches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the 
fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they 
suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the 



138 WALDEN 

machines to provide this provender, they are the 
machines to read it. They read the nine thou- 
sandth tale about Zebulon and Sephronia, and 
how they loved as none had ever loved before, 
and neither did the course of their true love run 
smooth, — at any rate, how it did run and stum- 
ble, and get up again and go on ! how some 
poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had 
better never have gone up as far as the belfry; 
and then, having needlessly got him up there, 
the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world 
to come together and hear, O dear ! how he 
did get down again ! For my part, I think that 
they had better metamorphose all such aspiring 
heroes of universal noveldom into man weather- 
cocks, as they used to put heroes among the con- 
stellations, and let them swing round there till 
they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother 
honest men with their pranks. The next time 
the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though 
the meeting-house burn down. "The Skip of the 
Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages, 
by the celebrated author of *Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to 
appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don't 
all come together." All this they read with saucer 
eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with 
unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet 
need no sharpening, just as some little four-year- 
old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of 
Cinderella, — without any improvement, that I 



READING 139 

can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or em- 
phasis, or any more skill in extracting or insert- 
ing the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a 
stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general 
deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual 
faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked 
daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or 
rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a 
surer market. 

The best books are not read even by those who 
are called good readers. What does our Concord 
culture amount to ? There is in this town, with 
a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or 
for very good books even in English literature, 
whose words all can read and spell. Even the 
college-bred and so-called liberally educated men 
here and elsewhere have really little or no ac- 
quaintance with the English classics ; and as for 
the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient 
classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all 
who will know of them, there are the feeblest 
efforts anywhere made to become acquainted 
with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle 
age, who takes a French paper, not for news as 
he says, for he is above that, but to ''keep him- 
self in practice," he being a Canadian by birth; 
and when I ask him what he considers the best 
thing he can do in this world, he says, besides 
this, to keep up and add to his English. This is 
about as much as the college-bred generally do 



140 WALDEN 

or aspire to do, and they take an English paper 
for the purpose. One who has just come from 
reading perhaps one of the best Enghsh books 
will find how many with whom he can converse 
about it ? Or suppose he comes from reading a 
Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose 
praises are familiar even to the so-called illit- 
erate ; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but 
must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is 
hardly the professor in our colleges who, if he 
has mastered the difficulties of the language, has 
proportionately mastered the difficulties of the 
wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any 
sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic 
reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or 
Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me 
even their titles ? Most men do not know that 
any nation but the Hebrews have had a scrip- 
ture. A man, any man, will go considerably out 
of his way to pick up a silver dollar ; but here are 
golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity 
have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every 
succeeding age have assured us of ; — and yet 
we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the 
primers and class-books, and when we leave 
school, the "Little Reading," and story books, 
which are for boys and beginners ; and our read- 
ing, our conversation and thinking, are all on a 
very low level, worthy only of pygmies and 
manikins. 



READING 141 

I aspire to be acquainted with wiser raen than 
this our Concord soil has produced, whose 
names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear 
the name of Plato and never read his book ? As 
if Plato were my townsman and I never saw 
him, — my next neighbor and I never heard 
him speak or attended to the wisdom of his 
words. But how actually is it ? His Dialogues, 
which contain what was immortal in him, lie 
on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. 
We are under-bred and low-lived and illiterate; 
and in this respect I confess I do not make any 
very broad distinction between the illiterate- 
ness of my townsman who cannot read at all, 
and the illiterateness of him who has learned to 
read only what is for children and feeble intel- 
lects. We should be as good as the worthies of 
antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good 
they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar 
but little higher in our intellectual flights than 
the columns of the daily paper. 

It is not all books that are as dull as their 
readers. There are probably words addressed 
to our condition exactly, which, if we could really 
hear and understand, would be more salutary 
than the morning or the spring to our lives, and 
possibly put a new aspect on the face of things 
for us. How many a man has dated a new era 
in his life from the reading of a book. The book 
exists for us perchance which will explain our 



142 WALDEN 

miracles and reveal new ones. The at present 
unutterable things we may find somewhere ut- 
tered. These same questions that disturb and 
puzzle and confound us have in their turn oc- 
curred to all the wise men; not one has been 
omitted; and each has answered them, accord- 
ing to his ability, by his words and his life. 
Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality. 
The solitary hired man on a farm in the out- 
skirts of Concord, who has had his second birth 
and peculiar religious experience, and is driven 
as he believes into silent gravity and exclusive- 
ness by his faith, may think it is not true; but 
Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the 
same road and had the same experience; but 
he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and 
treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even 
said to have invented and established worship 
among men. Let him humbly commune with 
Zoroaster then, and, through the liberalizing in- 
fluence of all the worthies, with Jesus Christ 
Himself, and let ''our church" go by the board. 
We boast that we belong to the nineteenth 
century and are making the most rapid strides of 
any nation. But consider how little this vil- 
lage does for its own culture. I do not wish to 
flatter my townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, 
for that will not advance either of us. We need 
to be provoked, — goaded like oxen, as we are, 
into a trot. We have a comparatively decent 



READING 143 

system of common schools, schools for infants 
only; but excepting the half-starved Lyceum in 
the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a 
library suggested by the state, no school for our- 
selves. We spend more on almost any article 
of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental 
aliment. It is time that we had uncommon 
schools, that we did not leave off our education 
when we begin to be men and women. It is 
time that villages were universities, and their 
elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, 
with leisure — if they are indeed so well off — 
to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. 
Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one 
Oxford forever ? Cannot students be boarded 
here and get a liberal education under the skies 
of Concord ? Can we not hire some Abelard to 
lecture to us ? Alas ! what with foddering the 
cattle and tending the store, w^e are kept from 
school too long, and our education is sadly neg- 
lected. In this country, the village should in 
some respects take the place of the nobleman 
of Europe. It should be the patron of the fine 
arts. It is rich enough. It wants only the mag- 
nanimity and refinement. It can spend money 
enough on such things as farmers and traders 
value, but it is thought Utopian to propose 
spending money for things which more intelli- 
gent men know to be of far more worth. This 
town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a 



144 WALDEN 

townhouse, thank fortune or politics, but prob- 
ably it will not spend so much on living wit, the 
true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred 
years. The one hundred and twenty-five dol- 
lars annually subscribed for a Lyceum in the 
winter is better spent than any other equal sum 
raised in the town. If we live in the nineteenth 
century, why should we not enjoy the advan- 
tages which the nineteenth century offers ? Why 
should our life be in any respect provincial ? If 
we will read newspapers, why not skip the gos- 
sip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the 
world at once ? — not be sucking the pap of 
"neutral family" papers, or browsing ** Olive 
Branches" here in New England. Let there- 
ports of all the learned societies come to us, and 
we will see if they know anything. Why should 
we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding 
& Co. to select our reading .? As the nobleman 
of cultivated taste surrounds himself with what- 
ever conduces to his culture, — genius — learn- 
ing — wit — books — paintings — statuary — 
music — philosophical instruments, and the like ; 
so let the village do, — not stop short at a peda- 
gogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and 
three selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers 
got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock 
with these. To act collectively is according to 
the spirit of our institutions ; and I am confident 
that, as our circumstances are more flourishing, 



READING 145 

our means are greater than the nobleman's. 
New England can hire all the wise men in the 
world to come and teach her, and board them 
round the while, and not be provincial at all. 
That is the uncommon school we want. Instead 
of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men. 
If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, 
go round a little there, and throw one arch at 
least over the darker gulf of ignorance which 
surrounds us. 




IV 

SOUNDS 

UT while we are confined to books, though 
the most select and classic, and read only 
particular written languages, which are 
themselves but dialects and provincial, we are 
in danger of forgetting the language which all 
things and events speak without metaphor, 
which alone is copious and standard. Much is 
published, but little printed. The rays which 
stream through the shutter will be no longer re- 
membered when the shutter is wholly removed. 
No method nor discipline can supersede the 
necessity of being forever on the alert. What is 
a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no 
matter how well selected, or the best society, or 
the most admirable routine of life, compared 
with the discipline of looking always at what is 
to be seen.? Will you be a reader, a student 
merely, or a seer.? Read your fate, see what is 
before you, and walk on into futurity. 

I did not read books the first summer; I 
hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. 
There were times when I could not afford to 
sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any 



SOUNDS 147 

work, whether of the head or hands. I love a 
broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a sum- 
mer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, 
I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, 
rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories 
and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and still- 
ness, while the birds sang around or flitted noise- 
less through the house, until by the sun falling 
in at my west window, or the noise of some 
traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was 
reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those 
seasons like corn in the night, and they were far 
better than any work of the hands would have 
been. They were not time subtracted from my 
life, but so much over and above my usual al- 
lowance. I realized what the Orientals mean 
by contemplation and the forsaking of works. 
For the most part, I minded not how the hours 
went. The day advanced as if to light some 
work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it 
is evening, and nothing memorable is accom- 
plished. Instead of singing like the birds, I 
silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. 
As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hick- 
ory before my door, so had I my chuckle or sup- 
pressed warble which he might hear out of my 
nest. My days were not days of the week, bear- 
ing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were 
they minced into hours and fretted by the tick- 
ing of a clock ; for I lived like the Puri Indians, 



148 WALDEN 

of whom it is said that *'for yesterday, to-day, 
and to-morrow they have only one word, and 
they express the variety of meaning by pointing 
backward for yesterday, forward for to-morrow, 
and overhead for the passing day." This was 
sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt ; 
but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their 
standard, I should not have been found wanting. 
A man must find his occasions in himself, it is 
true. The natural day is very calm, and will 
hardly reprove his indolence. 

I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of 
life, over those who were obliged to look abroad 
for amusement, to society and the theatre, that 
my life itself was become my amusement and 
never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of 
many scenes and without an end. If we were 
always indeed getting our living, and regulating 
our lives according to the last and best mode we 
had learned, we should never be troubled with 
ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and 
it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every 
hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. 
When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, 
setting all my furniture out of doors on the 
grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, 
dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white 
sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom 
scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time 
the villagers had broken their fast the morning 



SOUNDS 149 

sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me 
to move in again, and my meditations were al- 
most uninterrupted. It was pleasant to see my 
whole household effects out on the grass, mak- 
ing a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my three- 
leo:o:ed table, from which I did not remove the 
books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines 
and hickories. They seemed glad to get out 
themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. 
I was sometimes tempted to stretch an awning 
over them and take my seat there. It was worth 
the while to see the sun shine on these things*, 
and hear the free wind blow on them ; so much 
more interesting most familiar objects look out 
doors than in the house. A bird sits on the next 
bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, 
and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine 
cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are 
strewn about. It looked as if this was the way 
these forms came to be transferred to our fur- 
niture, to tables, chairs, and bedstead, — be- 
cause they once stood in their midst. 

My house was on the side of a hill, immedi- 
ately on the edge of the larger wood, in the 
midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hick- 
ories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to 
which a narrow footpath led down the hill. In 
my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, 
and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, 
shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and 



150 WALDEN 

ground-nuL Near the end of May, the sand- 
cherry {cerasus pumila) adorned the sides of the 
path with its delicate flowers arranged in um- 
bels cylindrically about its short stems, which 
last, in the fall, weighed down with good-sized 
and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like 
rays on every side. I tasted them out of compli- 
ment to Nature, though they were scarcely pala- 
table. The sumach (rhus glabra) grew luxuri- 
antly about the house, pushing up through the 
embankment which I had made, and growing 
five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate 
tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look 
on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late 
in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed 
to be dead, developed themselves as by magic 
into graceful green and tender boughs, an inch 
in diameter ; and sometimes, as I sat at my win- 
dow, so heedlessly did they grow and tax their 
weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough 
suddenly fall like a fan to the ground, when 
there was not a breath of air stirring, broken off 
by its own weight. In August, the large masses 
of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted 
many wild bees, gradually assumed their bright 
velvety crimson hue, and by their weight again 
bent down and broke the tender limbs. 

As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, 
hawks are circling about my clearing; the tan- 
tivy of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes 



SOUNDS 151 

athwart my view, or perching restless on the 
white-pine boughs behind my house, gives a 
voice to the air; a fishhawk dimples the glassy 
surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a 
mink steals out of the marsh before my door and 
seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending 
under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither 
and thither; and for the last half hour I have 
heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away 
and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, 
conveying travellers from Boston to the country. 
For I did not live so out of the world as that boy 
who, as I hear, was put out to a farmer in the 
east part of the town, but erelong ran away and 
came home again, quite down at the heel and 
homesick. He had never seen such a dull and 
out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone 
off ; why, you could n't even hear the whistle ! 
I doubt if there is such a place in Massachusetts 
now: — 

"In truth, our village has become a butt 
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er 
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is — Concord." 

The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond 
about a hundred rods south of where I dwell. I 
usually go to the village along its causeway, and 
am, as it were, related to society by this link. 
The men on the freight trains, who go over the 
whole length of the road, bow to me as to an old 
acquaintance, they pass me so often, and ap- 



152 WALDEN 

parently they take me for an employee; and so 
I am. I too would fain be a track-repairer 
somewhere in the orbit of the earth. 

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my 
woods summer and winter, sounding like the 
scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's 
yard, informing me that many restless city mer- 
chants are arriving within the circle of the town, 
or adventurous country traders from the other 
side. As they come under one horizon, they 
shout their warning to get off the track to the 
other, heard sometimes through the circles of 
two towns. Here come your groceries, country; 
your rations, countrymen ! Nor is there any 
man so independent on his farm that he can say 
them nay. And here's your pay for them ! 
screams the countryman's whistle; timber like 
long battering rams going twenty miles an hour 
against the city's walls, and chairs enough to 
seat all the weary and heavy laden that dwell 
within them. With such huge and lumbering 
civility the country hands a chair to the city. 
All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all 
the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. 
Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth ; 
up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up 
come the books, but down goes the wit that writes 
them. 

When I meet the engine with its train of cars 
moving off with planetary motion, — or, rather. 







^ 









SOUNDS 153 

like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with 
that velocity and with that direction it will ever 
revisit this system, since its orbit does not look 
like a returning curve, — with its steam cloud 
like a banner streaming behind in golden and 
silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which 
I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its 
masses to the light, — as if this travelling demi- 
god, this cloud-compeller, would erelong take 
the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when 
I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with 
his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with 
his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his 
nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery 
dragon they will put into the new Mythology 
I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a 
race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it 
seems, and men made the elements their servants 
for noble ends ! If the cloud that hangs over 
the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, 
or as beneficent as that which floats over the 
farmer's fields, then the elements and Nature 
herself would cheerfully accompany men on 
their errands and be their escort. 

I watch the passage of the morning cars with 
the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, 
which is hardly more regular. Their train of 
clouds stretching far behind and rising higher 
and higher, going to heaven while the cars are 
going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute 



154 WALDEN 

and casts my distant field into the shade, a 
celestial train beside which the petty train of 
cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the 
spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up 
early this winter morning by the light of the 
stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness 
his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early 
to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If 
the enterprise were as innocent as it is early ! 
If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow- 
shoes, and with the giant plough plough a fur- 
row from the mountains to the seaboard, in 
which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, 
sprinkle all the restless men and floating mer- 
chandise in the country for seed. All day the 
fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only 
that his master may rest, and I am awakened 
by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, 
when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts 
the elements incased in ice and snow; and he 
will reach his stall only with the morning star, 
to start once more on his travels without rest or 
slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him 
in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy 
of the day, that he may calm his nerves and 
cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron 
slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and 
commanding as it is protracted and unwearied ! 
Far through unfrequented woods on the con- 
fines of towns, where once only the hunter pene- 



SOUNDS 155 

trated by day, in the darkest night dart these 
bright saloons without the knowledge of their 
inhabitants ; this moment stopping at some bril- 
liant station-house in town or city, where a 
social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal 
Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The startings 
and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the 
village day. They go and come with such regu- 
larity and precision, and their whistle can be 
heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by 
them, and thus one well-conducted institution 
regulates a whole country. Have not men im- 
proved somewhat in punctuality since the rail- 
road was invented ? Do they not talk and think 
faster in the depot than they did in the stage- 
office ? There is something electrifying in the 
atmosphere of the former place. I have been 
astonished at the miracles it has wrought; that 
some of my neighbors, who, I should have 
prophesied, once for all, would never get to 
Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand 
when the bell rings. To do things "railroad 
fashion" is now the by-word; and it is worth 
the while to be warned so often and so sincerely 
by any power to get off its track. There is no 
stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the 
heads of the mob, in this case. We have con- 
structed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns 
aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.) 
Men are advertised that at a certain hour and 



156 WALDEN 

minute these bolts will be shot toward par- 
ticular points of the compass; yet it interferes 
with no man's business, and the children go to 
school on the other track. We live the steadier 
for it. We are all educated thus to be sons of 
Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every 
path but your own is the path of fate. Keep 
on your own track, then. 

What recommends commerce to me is its 
enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its 
hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men 
every day go about their business with more or 
less courage and content, doing more even than 
they suspect, and perchance better employed 
than they could have consciously devised. I 
am less affected by their heroism who stood up 
for half an hour in the front line at Buena 
Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of 
the men who inhabit the snow-plough for their 
winter quarters; who have not merely the three 
o'clock in the morning courage, which Bona- 
parte thought was the rarest, but whose courage 
does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only 
when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron 
steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great 
Snow, perchance, which is still raging and chill- 
ing men's blood, I hear the muffled tone of their 
engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled 
breath, which announces that the cars are coming^ 
without long delay, notwithstanding the veto 



SOUNDS 157 

of a New England northeast snow storm, and 
I behold the ploughmen covered with snow and 
rime, their heads peering above the mould- 
board which is turning down other than daisies 
and the nests of field-mice, like boulders of the 
Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in 
the universe. 

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and 
serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It 
is very natural in its methods withal, far more 
so than many fantastic enterprises and senti- 
mental experiments, and hence its singular 
success. I am refreshed and expanded when 
the freight train rattles past me, and I smell 
the stores which go dispensing their odors all 
the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, 
reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, 
and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the 
extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of 
the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which 
will cover so many flaxen New England heads 
the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoa- 
nut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, 
and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails is 
more legible and interesting now than if they 
should be wrought into paper and printed books. 
Who can write so graphically the history of the 
storms they have weathered as these rents have 
done ? They are proof-sheets which need no 
correction. Here goes lumber from the Maine 



158 WALDEN 

woods, which did not go out to sea in the last 
freshet, risen four dollars on the thousand be- 
cause of what did go out or was split up : pine, 
spruce, cedar, — first, second, third, and fourth 
qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave 
over the bear, and moose, and caribou. Next 
rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which will 
get far among the hills before it gets slacked. 
These rags in bales, of all hues and qualities, 
the lowest condition to which cotton and linen 
descend, the final result of dress, — of patterns 
which are now no longer cried up, unless it be 
in Milwaukie, as those splendid articles, Eng- 
lish, French, or American prints, ginghams, 
muslins, &c., gathered from all quarters both 
of fashion and poverty, going to become paper 
of one color or a few shades only, on which for- 
sooth will be written tales of real life, high and 
low, and founded on fact ! This closed car 
smells of salt fish, the strong New England and 
commercial scent, reminding me of the Grand 
Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a 
salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so 
that nothing can spoil it, and putting the per- 
severance of the saints to the blush ? with which 
you may sweep or pave the streets, and split 
your kindlings, and the teamster shelter himself 
and his lading against sun, wind, and rain be- 
hind it, — and the trader, as a Concord trader 
once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when 



SOUNDS 159 

he commences business, until at last his oldest 
customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal, 
vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure 
as a snowflake, and if it be put into a pot and 
boiled, will come out an excellent dun fish for a 
Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, with the 
tails still preserving their twist and the angle 
of elevation they had when the oxen that wore 
them were careering over the pampas of the 
Spanish main, — a type of all obstinacy, and 
evincing how almost hopeless and incurable 
are all constitutional vices. I confess that, 
practically speaking, when I have learned a 
man's real disposition, I have no hopes of 
changing it for the better or worse in this state 
of existence. As the Orientals say, "A cur's 
tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound 
round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' 
labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its 
natural form." The only effectual cure for such 
inveteracies as these tails exhibit is to make 
glue of them, which I believe is what is usually 
done with them, and then they will stay put and 
stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses or of 
brandy directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, 
Vermont, some trader among the Green Moun- 
tains, who imports for the farmers near his clear- 
ing, and now perchance stands over his bulk- 
head and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, 
how they may affect the price for him, telling 



160 WALDEN 

his customers this moment, as he has told them 
twenty times before this morning, that he ex- 
pects some by the next train of prime quahty. 
It is advertised in the Cuttingsville Times. 

While these things go up other things come 
down. Warned by the whizzing sound, I look 
up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn 
on far northern hills, which has winged its way 
over the Green Mountains and the Connecticut, 
shot like an arrow through the township within 
ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it; 
going 

"to be the mast 
Of some great ammiral." 

And hark ! here comes the cattle-train bearing 
the cattle of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, 
and cow-yards in the air, drovers with their 
sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their 
flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled 
along like leaves blown from the mountains by 
the September gales. The air is filled with the 
bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of 
oxen, as if a pastoral valley were going by. When 
the old bell-wether at the head rattles his bell, 
the mountains do indeed skip like rams and the 
little hills like lambs. A car-load of drovers, too, 
in the midst, on a level with their droves now, 
their vocation gone, but still clinging to their 
useless sticks as their badge of office. But their 
dogs, where are they ? It is a stampede to them ; 



SOUNDS 161 

they are quite thrown out; they have lost the 
scent. Methinks I hear them barking behind 
the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western 
slope of the Green Mountains. They will not 
be in at the death. Their vocation, too, is gone. 
Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now. 
They will shnk back to their kennels in dis- 
grace, or perchance run wild and strike a league 
with the wolf and the fox. So is your pastoral 
life whirled past and away. But the bell rings, 
and I must get off the track and let the cars go 
by:- 

What's the railroad to me? 

I never go to see 

Where it ends. 

It fills a few hollows. 

And makes banks for the swallows. 

It sets the sand a-blowing, 

And the blackberries a-growing, 

but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I 
will not have my eyes put out and my ears 
spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing. 

Now that the cars are gone by and all the 
restless world with them, and the fishes in the 
pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more 
alone than ever. For the rest of the long after- 
noon, perhaps, my meditations are interrupted 
only by the faint rattle of a carriage or team 
along the distant highway. • 

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the 

6 



162 WALDEN 

Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when 
the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as 
it were, natural melody, worth importing into 
the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over 
the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory 
hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were 
the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound 
heard at the greatest possible distance produces 
one and the same effect, a vibration of the uni- 
versal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere 
makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to 
our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There 
came to me in this case a melody which the air 
had strained, and which had conversed with 
every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion 
of the sound which the elements had taken up 
and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. 
The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, 
and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is 
not merely a repetition of what was worth re- 
peating in the bell, but partly the voice of the 
wood ; the same trivial words and notes sung by 
a wood-nymph. 

At evening, the distant lowing of some cow 
in the horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet 
and melodious, and at first I would mistake it 
for the voices of certain minstrels by whom I 
was sometimes serenaded, who might be stray- 
ing over hill and dale; but soon I was not un- 
pleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged 



SOUNDS 163 

into the cheap and natural music of the cow. I 
do not mean to be satirical, but to express my 
appreciation of those youths' singing, when I 
state that I perceived clearly that it was akin to 
the music of the cow, and they were at length one 
articulation of Nature. 

Regularly at half -past seven, in one part of 
the summer, after the evening train had gone 
by, the whippoorwills chanted their vespers for 
half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, 
or upon the ridge pole of the house. They would 
begin to sing almost with as much precision as 
a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, 
referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. 
I had a rare opportunity to become acquainted 
with their habits. Sometimes I heard four or 
five at once in different parts of the wood, by 
accident one a bar behind another, and so near 
me that I distinguished not only the cluck after 
each note, but often that singular buzzing sound 
like a fly in a spider's web, only proportionally 
louder. Sometimes one would circle round and 
round me in the woods a few feet distant as if 
tethered by a string, when probably I was near 
its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout 
the night, and were again as musical as ever 
just before and about dawn. 

When other birds are still the screech owls 
take up the strain, like mourning women their 
ancient u-lu-lu. Their dismal scream is truly 



164 WALDEN 

Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags ! It is no 
honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who of the poets, 
but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard 
ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers 
remembering the pangs and delights of supernal 
love in the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear 
their wailing, their doleful responses, trilled 
along the woodside; reminding me sometimes 
of music and singing birds ; as if it were the dark 
and tearful side of music, the regrets and sighs 
that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, 
the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of 
fallen souls that once in human shape night- 
walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, 
now expiating their sins with their wailing 
hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their 
transgressions. They give me a new sense of 
the variety and capacity of that nature which is 
our common dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never 
had been hor-r-r-n! sighs one on this side of the 
pond, and circles with the restlessness of de- 
spair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then 
— that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n I echoes 
another on the farther side with tremulous 
sincerity, and — bor-r-r-r-n ! comes faintly from 
far in the Lincoln woods. 

I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near 
at hand you could fancy it the most melancholy 
sound in Nature, as if she meant by this to stereo- 
type and make permanent in her choir the dying 




'^ 



e 



^ 



-^ 



5 



SOUNDS 165 

moans of a human being, — some poor weak 
relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and 
howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on 
entering the dark valley, made more awful by a 
certain gurgling melodiousness, — I find my- 
self beginning with the letters gl when I try to 
imitate it, — expressive of a mind which has 
reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mor- 
tification of all healthy and courageous thought. 
It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane 
bowlings. But now one answers from far woods in 
a strain made really melodious by distance, — Hoo 
hoo hoo hoorer hoo ; and indeed for the most part 
it suggested only pleasing associations, whether 
heard by day or night, summer or winter. 

I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the 
idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a 
sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight 
woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a 
vast and undeveloped nature which men have not 
recognized. They represent the stark twilight 
and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day 
the sun has shone on the surface of some savage 
swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with 
usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, 
and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and 
the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath ; but now 
a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a 
different race of creatures awakes to express the 
meaning of Nature there. 



166 WALDEN 

Late in the evening I heard the distant rum- 
bling of wagons over bridges, — a sound heard 
farther than almost any other at night, — the 
baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing 
of some disconsolate cow in a distant barn-yard. 
In the meanwhile all the shore rang with the 
trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient 
wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, 
trying to sing a catch in their Stygian lake, — if 
the Walden nymphs will pardon the comparison, 
for though there are almost no weeds, there are 
frogs there, — who would fain keep up the hila- 
rious rules of their old festal tables, though their 
voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly grave, 
mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, 
and become only liquor to distend their paunches, 
and sweet intoxication never comes to drown the 
memory of the past, but mere saturation and 
waterloggedness and distention. The most alder- 
manic, with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which 
serves for a napkin to his drooling chaps, under 
this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of the 
once scorned water, and passes round the cup 
with the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r- 
oonk! and straightway comes over the water 
from some distant cove the same password re- 
peated, where the next in seniority and girth has 
gulped down to his mark; and when this ob- 
servance has made the circuit of the shores, then 
ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satis- 



SOUNDS 167 

faction, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn re- 
peats the same down to the least distended, leak- 
iest, and flabbiest-paunched, that there be no 
mistake; and then the bowl goes round again 
and again, until the sun disperses the morning 
mist, and only the patriarch is not under the 
pond, but vainly bellowing troonh from time to 
time, and pausing for a reply. 

I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of 
cock-crowing from my clearing, and I thought 
that it might be worth the while to keep a cockerel 
for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note 
of this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the 
most remarkable of any bird's, and if they could 
be naturalized without being domesticated, it 
would soon become the most famous sound in 
our woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose 
and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine 
the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when 
their lords' clarions rested ! No wonder that 
man added this bird to his tame stock, — to say 
nothing of the eggs and drumsticks. To walk in 
a winter morning in a wood where these birds 
abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild 
cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for 
miles over the resounding earth, drowning the 
feebler notes of other birds, — think of it ! It 
would put nations on the alert. Who would not 
be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every 
successive day of his life, till he became unspeak- 



168 WALDEN 

ably healthy, wealthy, and wise? This foreign 
bird's note is celebrated by the poets of all coun- 
tries along with the notes of their native song- 
sters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. 
He is more indigenous even than the natives. 
His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his 
spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the Atlantic 
and Pacific is awakened by his voice; but its 
shrill sound never roused me from my slumbers. 
I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so 
that you would have said there was a deficiency 
of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the 
spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, 
nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, 
to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would 
have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. 
Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved 
out, or rather were never baited in, — only 
squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip- 
poorwill on the ridge pole, a blue-jay screaming 
beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under 
the house, a screech-owl or a cat-owl behind it, a 
flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, 
and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark 
or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever 
visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor 
hens to cackle in the yard. No yard ! but un- 
fenced Nature reaching up to your very sills. 
A young forest growing up under your windows, 
and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking 



SOUNDS 169 

through into your cellar; sturdy pitch-pines 
rubbing and creaking against the shingles for 
want of room, their roots reaching quite under 
the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown 
off in the gale, — a pine tree snapped off or torn 
up by the roots behind your house for fuel. In- 
stead of no path to the front-yard gate in the 
Great Snow, — no gate — no front-yard, — and 
no path to the civilized world ! 



V 

SOLITUDE 

THIS is a delicious evening, when the whole 
body is one sense, and imbibes delight 
through every pore. I go and come with 
a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As 
I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my 
shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy 
and windy, and I see nothing special to attract 
me, all the elements are unusually congenial to 
me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, 
and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the 
rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy 
with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost 
takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my 
serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small 
waves raised by the evening wind are as remote 
from storm as the smooth reflecting surface. 
Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and 
roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some 
creatures lull the rest with their notes. The re- 
pose is never complete. The wildest animals do 
not repose, but seek their prey now ; the fox, and 
skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and 
woods without fear. They are Nature's watch- 



SOLITUDE 171 

men, — links which connect the days of animated 
Ufe. 

When I return to my house I find that visitors 
have been there and left their cards, either a 
bunch of flowers, or a wreath of evergreen, or a 
name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip. 
They who come rarely to the woods take some 
little piece of the forest into their hands to play 
with by the way, which they leave, either inten- 
tionally or accidentally. One has peeled a wil- 
low wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it 
on my table. I could always tell if visitors had 
called in my absence, either by the bended twigs 
or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally 
of what sex or age or quality they were by some 
slight trace left, as a flower dropped, or a bunch 
of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far 
off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by the 
lingering odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was 
frequently notified of the passage of a traveller 
along the highway sixty rods off by the scent of 
his pipe. 

There is commonly sufiicient space about us. 
Our horizon is never quite at our elbows. The 
thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, 
but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and 
worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some 
way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what rea- 
son have I this vast range and circuit, some 
square miles of unfrequented forest, for my 



17i^ WALDEN 

privacy, abandoned to me by men ? My nearest 
neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible 
from any place but the hill tops within half a 
mile of my own. I have my horizon bounded by 
woods all to myself; a distant view of the rail- 
road where it touches the pond on the one hand, 
and of the fence which skirts the woodland road 
on the other. But for the most part it is as soli- 
tary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much 
Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it 
were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a 
little world all to myself. At night there was 
never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at 
my door, more than if I were the first or last 
man ; unless it were in the spring, when at long 
intervals some came from the village to fish for 
pouts, — they plainly fished much more in the 
Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited 
their hooks with darkness, — but they soon re- 
treated, usually with light baskets, and left "the 
world to darkness and to me," and the black 
kernel of the night was never profaned by any 
human neighborhood. I believe that men are 
generally still a little afraid of the dark, though 
the witches are all hung, and Christianity and 
candles have been introduced. 

Yet I experienced sometimes that the most 
sweet and tender, the most innocent and encour- 
aging society may be found in any natural ob- 
ject, even for the poor misanthrope and most 



SOLITUDE 173 

melancholy man. There can be no very black 
melancholy to him who lives in the midst of 
Nature and has his senses still. There was never 
yet such a storm but it was iEolian music to a 
healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly 
compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sad- 
ness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons 
I trust that nothing can make life a burden to 
me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and 
keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and 
melancholy, but good for me, too. Though it 
prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth 
than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as 
to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy 
the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good 
for the grass on the uplands, and, beiug good for 
the grass, it would be good for me. Sometimes, 
when I compare myself with other men, it seems 
as if I were more favored by the gods than they, 
beyond any deserts that I am conscious of ; as if 
I had a warrant and surety at their hands which 
my fellows have not, and were especially guided 
and guarded. I do not flatter myself, but if it be 
possible they flatter me. I have never felt lone- 
some, or in the least oppressed by a sense of soli- 
tude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I 
came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted 
if the near neighborhood of man was not essen- 
tial to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was 
something unpleasant. But I was at the same 



174 WALDEN 

time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, 
and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst 
of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I 
was suddenly sensible of such sweet and benefi- 
cent society in Nature, in the very pattering of 
the drops, and in every sound and sight around 
my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendli- 
ness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, 
as made the fancied advantages of human neigh- 
borhood insignificant, and I have never thought 
of them since. Every little pine needle expanded 
and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. 
I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of 
something kindred to me, even in scenes which 
we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and 
also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest 
was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no 
place could ever be strange to me again. — 

"Mourning untimely consumes the sad; 
Few are their days in the land of the living, 
Beautiful daughter of Toscar." 

Some of my pleasantest hours were during the 
long rain storms in the spring or fall, which con- 
fined me to the house for the afternoon as well as 
the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and 
pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a 
long evening in which many thoughts had time 
to take root and unfold themselves. In those 
driving northeast rains which tried the village 



SOLITUDE 175 

houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop 
and pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, 
I sat behind my door in my Uttle house, which 
was all entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protec- 
tion. In one heavy thunder shower the lightning 
struck a large pitch-pine across the pond, making 
a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral 
groove from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, 
and four or five inches wide, as you would groove 
a walking-stick. I passed it again the other day, 
and was struck with awe on looking up and be- 
holding that mark, now more distinct than ever, 
w^here a terrific and resistless bolt came down 
out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men 
frequently say to me, ''I should think you would 
feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer 
to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights espe- 
cially." I am tempted to reply to such, — This 
whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in 
space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two 
most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the 
breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by 
our instruments ? Why should I feel lonely ? is 
not our planet in the Milky Way ? This which 
you put seems to me not to be the most important 
question. What sort of space is that which sepa- 
rates a man from his fellows and makes him soli- 
tary ? I have found that no exertion of the legs 
can bring two minds much nearer to one another. 
What do we want most to dwell near to ? Not to 



176 WALDEN 

many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the 
bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, 
the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, 
where men most congregate, but to the perennial 
source of our life, whence in all our experience 
we have found that to issue, as the willow stands 
near the water and sends out its roots in that 
direction. This will vary with different natures, 
but this is the place where a wise man will dig 
his cellar. ... I one evening overtook one of 
my townsmen, who has accumulated what is 
called "a handsome property," — though I 
never got a fair view of it, — on the Walden road, 
driving a pair of cattle to market, who inquired 
of me how I could bring my mind to give up so 
many of the comforts of life. I answered that I 
was very sure I liked it passably well ; I was not 
joking. And so I went home to my bed, and left 
him to pick his way through the darkness and 
the mud to Brighton, — or Bright-town, — which 
place he would reach sometime in the morning. 
Any prospect of awakening or coming to life 
to a dead man makes indifferent all times and 
places. The place where that may occur is 
always the same, and indescribably pleasant to 
all our senses. For the most part we allow only 
outlying and transient circumstances to make our 
occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our 
distraction. Nearest to all things is that power 
which fashions their being. Next to us the grand- 




The cartpath near Thoreaus hut 



SOLITUDE 177 

est laws are continually being executed. Next to 
us is not the workman whom we have hired, with 
whom we love so well to talk, but the workman 
whose work we are. 

*'How vast and profound is the influence of 
the subtile powers of Heaven and of Earth !" 

'*We seek to perceive them, and we do not see 
them ; we seek to hear them, and we do not hear 
them; identified with the substance of things, 
they cannot be separated from them." 

*'They cause that in all the universe men 
purify and sanctify their hearts, and clothe them- 
selves in their holiday garments to offer sacrifices 
and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean 
of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, 
above us, on our left, on our right ; they environ 
us on all sides." 

We are the subjects of an experiment which is 
not a little interesting to me. Can we not do 
without the society of our gossips a little while 
under these circumstances, — have our own 
thoughts to cheer us.^ Confucius says truly, 
*' Virtue does not remain as an abandoned 
orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors." 

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in 
a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind 
we can stand aloof from actions and their con- 
sequences; and all things, good and bad, go by 
us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in 
Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the 



178 WALDEN 

stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. 
I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on 
the other hand, I may not be affected by an act- 
ual event which appears to concern me much 
more. I only know myself as a human entity; 
the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections ; 
and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which 
I can stand as remote from myself as from an- 
other. However intense my experience, I am 
conscious of the presence of and criticism of a 
part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of 
me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but 
taking note of it ; and that is no more I than it 
is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of 
life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was 
a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, 
so far as he was concerned. This doubleness 
may easily make us poor neighbors and friends 
sometimes. 

I find it w^holesome to be alone the greater 
part of the time. To be in company, even with 
the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I 
love to be alone. I never found the companion 
that was so companionable as solitude. We are 
for the most part more lonely when we go abroad 
among men than when we stay in our chambers. 
A man thinking or working is always alone, let 
him be where he will. Solitude is not measured 
by the miles of space that intervene between a 
man and his fellows. The really diligent stu- 



1 



SOLITUDE 179 

dent in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge 
College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. 
The farmer can work alone in the field or the 
woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel 
lonesome, because he is employed ; but when he 
comes home at night he cannot sit down in a 
room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but 
must be where he can **see the folks," and 
recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, himself 
for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders 
how the student can sit alone in the house all 
night and most of the day without ennui and 
**the blues"; but he does not realize that the 
student, though in the house, is still at work in 
his field, and chopping in his woods, as the 
farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recre- 
ation and society that the latter does, though it 
may be a more condensed form of it. 

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at 
very short intervals, not having had time to ac- 
quire any new value for each other. We meet 
at meals three times a day, and give each other 
a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. 
We have to agree on a certain set of rules, called 
etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent 
meeting tolerable and that we need not come to 
open war. We meet at the post-office, and at 
the sociable, and about the fireside every night; 
we live thick and are in each other's way, and 
stumble over one another, and I think that we 



180 WALDEN 

thus lose some respect for one another. Cer- 
tainly less frequency would suffice for all im- 
portant and hearty communications. Consider 
the girls in a factory, — never alone, hardly in 
their dreams. It would be better if there were 
but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I 
live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that 
we should touch him. 

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and 
dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a 
tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the gro- 
tesque visions with which, owing to bodily 
weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded 
him, and which he believed to be real. So also, 
owing to bodily and mental health and strength, 
we may be continually cheered by a like but more 
normal and natural society, and come to know 
that we are never alone. 

I have a great deal of company in my house ; 
especially in the morning, when nobody calls. 
Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some 
one may convey an idea of my situation. I am 
no more lonely than the loon in the pond that 
laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. 
What company has that lonely lake, I pray ? 
And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue 
angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The 
sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there 
sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock 
sun. God is alone, — but the devil, he is far 



SOLITUDE 181 

from being alone; he sees a great deal of com- 
pany ; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a 
single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a 
bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble- 
bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, 
or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south 
wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or 
the first spider in a new house. 

I have occasional visits in the long winter 
evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind 
howls in the wood, from an old settler and origi- 
nal proprietor, who is reported to have dug 
Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with 
pine woods ; who tells me stories of old time and 
of new eternity ; and between us we manage to 
pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and 
pleasant views of things, even without apples or 
cider, — a most wise and humorous friend, 
whom I love much, who keeps himself more 
secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and 
though he is thought to be dead, none can show 
where he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells 
in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, 
in whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll 
sometimes, gathering simples and Ustening to 
her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled 
fertility, and her memory runs back farther than 
mythology, and she can tell me the original 
of every fable, and on what fact every one is 
founded, for the incidents occurred when she 



182 WALDEN 

was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who 
delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely 
to outlive all her children yet. 

The indescribable innocence and beneficence 
of Nature, — of sun and wind and rain, of sum- 
mer and winter, — such health, such cheer, they 
afford forever ! and such sympathy have they 
ever with our race, that all Nature would be 
affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the 
winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain 
tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put 
on mourning in midsummer, if any man should 
ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have 
intelligence with the earth .^ Am I not partly 
leaves and vegetable mould myself.'^ 

What is the pill which will keep us well, 
serene, contented ? Not my or thy great-grand- 
father's, but our great-grandmother Nature's 
universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which 
she has kept herself young always, outlived so 
many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health 
with their decaying fatness. For my panacea, 
instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture 
dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which 
come out of those long shallow black-schooner- 
looking wagons which we sometimes see made 
to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undi- 
luted morning air. Morning air ! If men will 
not drink of this at the fountain-head of the day, 
why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell 



SOLITUDE 183 

it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have 
lost their subscription ticket to morning time in 
this world. But remember, it will not keep quite 
till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive 
out the stopples long ere that and follow west- 
ward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper 
of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old 
herb-doctor ^sculapius, and who is represented 
on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, 
and in the other a cup out of which the serpent 
sometimes drinks; but rather of Hebe, cup- 
bearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno 
and wild lettuce, and who had the power of re- 
storing gods and men to the vigor of youth. She 
was probably the only thoroughly sound-con- 
ditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that 
ever walked the globe, and wherever she came 
it was spring. 



VI 

VISITORS 

I THINK that I love society as much as most, 
and am ready enough to fasten myself like 
a bloodsucker for the time to any full- 
blooded man that comes in my way. I am natu- 
rally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the 
sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my 
business called me thither. 

I had three chairs in my house: one for soli- 
tude, two for friendship, three for society. When 
visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers, 
there was but the third chair for them all, but 
they generally economized the room by stand- 
ing up. It is surprising how many great men and 
women a small house will contain. I have had 
twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at 
once under my roof, and yet we often parted 
without being aware that we had come very near 
to one another. Many of our houses, both pub- 
lic and private, with their almost innumerable 
apartments, their huge halls and their cellars 
for the storage of wines and other munitions of 
peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their 
inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent 



VISITORS 185 

that the latter seem to be only vermin which in- 
fest them. I am surprised when the herald 
blows his summons before some Tremont or 
Astor or Middlesex House, to see come creeping 
out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridicu- 
lous mouse, which soon again slinks into some 
hole in the pavement. 

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced 
in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a 
sufficient distance from my guest when we be- 
gan to utter the big thoughts in big words. You 
want room for your thoughts to get into sailing 
trim and run a course or two before they make 
their port. The bullet of your thought must 
have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion 
and fallen into its last and steady course before 
it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough 
out again through the side of his head. Also, 
our sentences wanted room to unfold and form 
their columns in the interval. Individuals, like 
nations, must have suitable broad and natural 
boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, 
between them. I have found it a singular lux- 
ury to talk across the pond to a companion on 
the opposite side. In my house we were so near 
that we could not begin to hear, — we could not 
speak low enough to be heard; as when you 
throw two stones into calm water so near that 
they break each other's undulations. If we are 
merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we 



186 WALDEN 

can afford to stand very near together, cheek by 
jowl, and feel each other's breath; but if we 
speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to 
be farther apart, that all animal heat and mois- 
ture may have a chance to evaporate. If we 
would enjoy the most intimate society with that 
in each of us which is without, or above, being 
spoken to, we must not only be silent, but com- 
monly so far apart bodily that we cannot 
possibly hear each other's voice in any case. 
Referred to this standard, speech is for the 
convenience of those who are hard of hear- 
ing; but there are many fine things which we 
cannot say if we have to shout. As the con- 
versation began to assume a loftier and grander 
tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther 
apart till they touched the wall in opposite 
corners, and then commonly there was not room 
enough. 

My '*best" room, however, my withdrawing 
room, always ready for company, on whose 
carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood 
behind my house. Thither in summer days, 
when distinguished guests came, I took them, 
and a priceless domestic swept the floor and 
dusted the furniture and kept the things in 
order. 

If one guest came he sometimes partook of 
my frugal meal and it was no interruption to 
conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding, or 



VISITORS 187 

watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of 
bread in the ashes, in the meanwhile. But if 
twenty came and sat in my house, there was 
nothing said about dinner, though there might 
be bread enough for two, more than if eating 
were a forsaken habit; but we naturally prac- 
tised abstinence; and this was never felt to be 
an offence against hospitality, but the most 
proper and considerate course. The waste and 
decay of physical life, which so often needs re- 
pair, seemed miraculously retarded in such a 
case, and the vital vigor stood its ground. I 
could entertain thus a thousand as well as 
twenty ; and if any ever went away disappointed 
or hungry from my house when they found me 
at home, they may depend upon it that I sym- 
pathized with them at least. So easy is it, though 
many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new 
and better customs in the place of the old. You 
need not rest your reputation on the dinners you 
give. For my own part, I was never so effectu- 
ally deterred from frequenting a man's house, 
by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the 
parade one made about dining me, which I took 
to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to 
trouble him so again. I think I shall never re- 
visit those scenes. I should be proud to have for 
the motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser 
which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow 
walnut leaf for a card : — 



188 WALDEN 

*' Arrived there, the little house they fill, 

Ne looke for entertainment where none was; 
Rest is their feast, and all things at their will: 
The noblest mind the best contentment has." 

When Winslow, afterward governor of the 
Plymouth Colony, went with a companion on a 
visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through 
the woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his 
lodge, they were well received by the king, but 
nothing was said about eating that day. When 
the night arrived, to quote their own words, — 
'*He laid us on the bed with himself and his 
wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it 
being only plank, laid a foot from the ground, 
and a thin mat upon them. Two more of his 
chief men, for want of room, pressed by and 
upon us; so that we were worse weary of our 
lodging than of our journey." At one o'clock 
the next day Massasoit "brought two fishes that 
he had shot," about thrice as big as a bream; 
"these being boiled, there were at least forty 
looked for a share in them. The most ate of 
them. This meal only we had in two nights and 
a day ; and had not one of us bought a partridge, 
we had taken our journey fasting." Fearing 
that they would be light-headed for want of 
food and also sleep, owing to "the savages' bar- 
barous singing (for they used to sing themselves 
asleep)," and that they might get home while 
they had strength to travel, they departed. As 



VISITORS 189 

for lodging, it is true they were but poorly en- 
tertained, though what they found an incon- 
venience was no doubt intended for an honor; 
but as far as eating was concerned, I do not see 
how the Indians could have done better. They 
had nothing to eat themselves, and they were 
wiser than to think that apologies could supply 
the place of food to their guests; so they drew 
their belts tighter and said nothing about it. 
Another time when Winslow visited them, it 
being a season of plenty with them, there was 
no deficiency in this respect. 

As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. 
I had more visitors while I lived in the woods 
than at any other period of my life ; I mean that 
I had some. I met several there under more 
favorable circumstances than I could anywhere 
else. But fewer came to see me upon trivial 
business. In this respect, my company was win- 
nowed by my mere distance from town. I had 
withdrawn so far within the great ocean of soli- 
tude, into which the rivers of society empty, that 
for the most part, so far as my needs were con- 
cerned, only the finest sediment was deposited 
around me. Besides, there were wafted to me 
evidences of unexplored and uncultivated con- 
tinents on the other side. 

Who should come to my lodge this morning 
but a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man, — he 
had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry 



190 WALDEN 

I cannot print it here, — a Canadian, a wood- 
chopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty 
posts in a day, who made his last supper on a 
woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has 
heard of Homer, and, "if it were not for books," 
would *'not know what to do rainy days," though 
perhaps he has not read one wholly through for 
many rainy seasons. Some priest who could 
pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read 
his verse in the testament in his native parish far 
away; and now I must translate to him, while 
he holds the book, Achilles' reproof to Patroclus, 
for his sad countenance. — ''Why are you in 
tears, Patroclus, like a young girl ?'' — 

*'Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia? 
They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor, 
And Peleus lives, son of ^Eacus, among the Myrmidons, 
Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve." 

He says, "That 's good." He has a great bundle 
of white-oak bark under his arm for a sick man, 
gathered this Sunday morning. "I suppose 
there 's no harm in going after such a thing to- 
day," says he. To him Homer was a great writer, 
though what his writing was about he did not 
know. A more simple and natural man it would 
be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast 
such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed 
to have hardly any existence for him. He was 
about twenty-eight years old, and had left 
Canada and his father's house a dozen years be- 



VISITORS 191 

fore to work in the States, and earn money to 
buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native 
country. He was cast in the coarsest mould ; a 
stout but shiggish body, yet gracefully carried, 
with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, 
and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasion- 
ally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray 
cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and 
cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of 
meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a 
couple of miles past my house, — for he chopped 
all summer, — in a tin pail ; cold meats, often 
cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle 
which dangled by a string from his belt; and 
sometimes he offered me a drink. He came 
along early, crossing my beanfield, though with- 
out anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as 
Yankees exhibit. He was n't a-going to hurt 
himself. He did n't care if he only earned his 
board. Frequently he would leave his dinner 
in the bushes, when his dog had caught a wood- 
chuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half 
to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house 
where he boarded, after deliberating first for half 
an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond 
safely till nightfall, — loving to dwell long upon 
these themes. He would say, as he went by in 
the morning: "How thick the pigeons are! If 
w^orking every day were not my trade, I could 
get all the meat I should want by hunting, — 



192 WALDEN 

pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges, — by 
gosh ! I could get all I should want for a week 
in one day." 

He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in 
some flourishes and ornaments in his art. He 
cut his trees level and close to the ground, that 
the sprouts which came up afterward might be 
more vigorous and a sled might slide over the 
stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to 
support his corded wood, he would pare it away 
to a slender stake or splinter which you could 
break off with your hand at last. 

He interested me because he was so quiet and 
solitary and so happy withal: a well of good 
humor and contentment which overflowed at 
his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Some- 
times I saw him at his work in the woods, felling 
trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of in- 
expressible satisfaction, and a salutation in 
Canadian French, though he spoke English as 
well. When I approached him he would sus- 
pend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth 
lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, 
and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a 
ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. 
Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that 
he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the 
ground with laughter at anything which made 
him think and tickled him. Looking round upon 
the trees he would exclaim, — "By George! I 



VISITORS 193 

can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I 
want no better sport." Sometimes, when at 
leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods 
with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at 
regular intervals as he walked. In the winter he 
had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee 
in a kettle ; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner 
the chickadees would sometimes come round and 
alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his 
fingers; and he said that he "liked to have the 
little feller's about him." 

In him the animal man chiefly was developed. 
In physical endurance and contentment he was 
cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him 
once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after 
working all day; and he answered with a sin- 
cere and serious look, *'Gorrappit, I never was 
tired in my life." But the intellectual and what 
is called spiritual man in him were slumbering 
as in an infant. He had been instructed only in 
that innocent and ineffectual way in which the 
Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which 
the pupil is never educated to the degree of con- 
sciousness, but only to the degree of trust and 
reverence, and a child is not made a man, but 
kept a child. When Nature made him, she gave 
him a strong body and contentment for his por- 
tion, and propped him on every side with rever- 
ence and reliance, that he might live out his three- 
score years and ten a child. He was so genuine 

7 



194 WALDEN 

and unsophisticated that no introduction would 
serve to introduce him, more than if you intro- 
duced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had 
got to find him out as you did. He would not 
play any part. Men paid him wages for work, 
and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he 
never exchanged opinions with them. He was so 
simply and naturally humble — if he can be 
called humble who never aspires — that humility 
was no distinct quality in him, nor could he con- 
ceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If 
you told him that such a one was coming, he did 
as if he thought that anything so grand would ex- 
pect nothing of himself, but take all the respon- 
sibility on itself, and let him be forgotten still. 
He never heard the sound of praise. He par- 
ticularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. 
Their performances were miracles. When I 
told him that I wrote considerably, he thought 
for a long time that it was merely the hand- 
writing which I meant, for he could write a re- 
markably good hand himself. I sometimes 
found the name of his native parish handsomely 
written in the snow by the highway, with the 
proper French accent, and knew that he had 
passed. I asked him if he ever wished to write 
his thoughts. He said that he had read and 
written letters for those who could not, but he 
never tried to write thoughts, — no, he could 
not, he could not tell what to put first, it would 



VISITORS 195 

kill him, and then there was spelling to be at- 
tended to at the same time ! 

I heard that a distinguished wise man and re- 
former asked him if he did not want the world 
to be changed ; but he answered with a chuckle 
of surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing 
that the question had ever been entertained be- 
fore, *'No, I like it well enough." It would have 
suggested many things to a philosopher to have 
dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared 
to know nothing of things in general; yet I 
sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen 
before, and I did not know whether he was as 
wise as Shakspeare or as simply ignorant as a 
child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic 
consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told 
me that when he met him sauntering through 
the village in his small close-fitting cap, and 
whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince 
in disguise. 

His only books were an almanac and an arith- 
metic, in which last he was considerably expert. 
The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, 
which he supposed to contain an abstract of 
human knowledge, as indeed it does to a consid- 
erable extent. I loved to sound him on the vari- 
ous reforms of the day, and he never failed to 
look at them in the most simple and practical 
light. He had never heard of such things be- 
fore. Could he do without factories ? I asked. 



196 WALDEN 

He had worn the home-made Vermont gray, he 
said, and that was good. Could he dispense 
with tea and coffee ? Did this country afford any 
beverage besides water ? He had soaked hem- 
lock leaves in water and drunk it, and thought 
that was better than water in warm weather. 
When I asked him if he could do without money, 
he showed the convenience of money in such a 
way as to suggest and coincide with the most 
philosophical accounts of the origin of this insti- 
tution, and the very derivation of the word 
pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he 
wished to get needles and thread at the store, he 
thought it would be inconvenient, and impossi- 
ble soon, to go on mortgaging some portion of 
the creature each time to that amount. He 
could defend many institutions better than any 
philosopher, because, in describing them as they 
concerned him, he gave the true reason for their 
prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to 
him any other. At another time, hearing Plato's 
definition of a man, — a biped without feathers, 
— and that one exhibited a cock plucked and 
called it Plato's man, he thought it an important 
difference that the knees bent the wrong way. 
He would sometimes exclaim: *'How I love to 
talk! By George, I could talk all day!" I 
asked him once, when I had not seen him for 
many months, if he had got a new idea this sum- 
mer. "Good Lord," said he, "a man that has 



VISITORS 197 

to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas 
he has had, he will do well. Maybe the man 
you hoe with is inclined to race ; then, by gorry, 
your mind must be there; you think of weeds." 
He would sometimes ask me first, on such occa- 
sions, if I had made any improvement. One 
winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied 
with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute 
within him for the priest without, and some higher 
motive for living. ''Satisfied !" said he; '*some 
men are satisfied with one thing, and some with 
another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, 
will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to 
the fire and his belly to the table, by George !" 
Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him 
to take the spiritual view of things; the highest 
that he appeared to conceive of was a simple ex- 
pediency, such as you might expect an animal to 
appreciate ; and this, practically, is true of most 
men. If I suggested any improvement in his 
mode of life, he merely answered, without ex- 
pressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet 
he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like 
virtues. 

There was a certain positive originality, how- 
ever slight, to be detected in him, and I occasion- 
ally observed that he was thinking for himself 
and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon 
so rare that I would any day walk ten miles 
to observe it, and it amounted to the reorig- 



198 WALDEN 

ination of many of the institutions of society. 
Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to ex- 
press himself distinctly, he always had a pre- 
sentable thought behind. Yet his thinking 
was so primitive and immersed in his animal 
life, that, though more promising than a merely 
learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything 
which can be reported. He suggested that there 
might be men of genius in the lowest grades of 
life, however permanently humble and illiterate, 
who take their own view always, or do not pre- 
tend to see at all ; who are as bottomless even as 
Walden Pond was thought to be, though they 
may be dark and muddy. 

Many a traveller came out of his way to see me 
and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for 
calling, asked for a glass of water. I told them 
that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, 
offering to lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, 
I was not exempted from that annual visitation 
which occurs, methinks, about the first of April, 
when everybody is on the move; and I had my 
share of good luck, though there were some 
curious specimens among my visitors. Half- 
witted men from the almshouse and elsewhere 
came to see me ; but I endeavored to make them 
exercise all the wit they had, and make their con- 
fessions to me; in such cases making wit the 
theme of our conversation; and so was com- 



VISITORS 199 

pensated. Indeed, I found some of them to be 
wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and 
selectmen of the town, and thought it was time 
that the tables were turned. With respect to wit, 
I learned that there was not much difference be- 
tween the half and the whole. One day, in par- 
ticular, an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, 
whom with others I had often seen used as fenc- 
ing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the 
fields to keep cattle and himself from straying, 
visited me, and expressed a wish to live as I did. 
He told me, with the utmost simplicity and 
truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to any- 
thing that is called humility, that he was '* defi- 
cient in intellect." These were his words. The 
Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the 
Lord cared as much for him as for another. 
**I have always been so," said he, "from my 
childhood ; I never had much mind ; I was not 
like other children ; I am weak in the head. It 
was the Lord's will, I suppose." And there he 
was to prove the truth of his words. He was a 
metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a 
fellow-man on such promising ground, — it was 
so simple and sincere and so true, all that he 
said. And, true enough, in proportion as he ap- 
peared to humble himself was he exalted. I did 
not know at first but it was the result of a wise 
policy. It seemed that from such a basis of 
truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed 



200 WALDEN 

pauper had laid, our intercourse might go for- 
ward to something better than the intercourse 
of sages. 

I had some guests from those not reckoned 
commonly among the town's poor, but who 
should be; who are among the world's poor, at 
any rate ; guests who appeal, not to your hospital- 
ity, but to your hospital-ality ; who earnestly wish 
to be helped, and preface their appeal with the in- 
formation that they are resolved, for one thing, 
never to help themselves. I require of a visitor 
that he be not actually starving, though he may 
have the very best appetite in the world, however 
he got it. Objects of charity are not guests. 
Men who did not know when their visit had 
terminated, though I went about my business 
again, answering them from greater and greater 
remoteness. Men of almost every degree of wit 
called on me in the migrating season. Some 
who had more wits than they knew what to do 
with ; runaway slaves with plantation manners, 
who listened from time to time, like the fox in the 
fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on 
their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as 
much as to say, — 

"O Christian, will you send me back?" 

One real runaway slave among the rest, whom I 
helped to forward toward the north star. Men of 
one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a 




Children in the woods by the pond 



VISITORS 201 

duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and un- 
kempt heads, like those hens which are made to 
take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit 
of one bug, a score of them lost in every morn- 
ing's dew, — and become frizzled and mangy in 
consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a 
sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl 
all over. One man proposed a book in which 
visitors should write their names, as at the White 
Mountains ; but, alas ! I have too good a mem- 
ory to make that necessary. 

I could not but notice some of the peculiarities 
of my visitors. Girls and boys and young 
women generally seemed glad to be in the woods. 
They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and 
improved their time. Men of business, even 
farmers, thought only of solitude and employ- 
ment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt 
from something or other; and though they said 
that they loved a ramble in the woods occa- 
sionally, it was obvious that they did not. Rest- 
less committed men, whose time was all taken 
up in getting a living or keeping it; ministers 
who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monop- 
oly of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of 
opinions ; doctors, lawyers, uneasy housekeepers 
who pried into my cupboard and bed when I 

was out, — how came Mrs. to know that 

my sheets were not as clean as hers ? — young 
men wb.o had ceased to be young, and had con- 



202 WALDEN 

eluded that it was safest to follow the beaten 
track of the professions, — all these generally 
said that it was not possible to do so much good 
in my position. Ay ! there was the rub. The 
old and infirm and the timid, of whatever age or 
sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden acci- 
dent and death ; to them life seemed full of dan- 
ger, — what danger is there if you don't think of 
any ? — and they thought that a prudent man 
would carefully select the safest position, where 
Dr. B. might be on hand at a moment's warn- 
ing. To them the village was literally a com- 
munity, a league for mutual defence, and you 
would suppose that they would not go a-huckle- 
berrying without a medicine chest. The amount 
of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger 
that he may die, though the danger must be al- 
lowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and- 
alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks 
as he runs. Finally, there were the self-styled 
reformers, the greatest bores of all, who thought 
that I was forever singing, — 

This is the house that I built; 

This is the man that lives in the house that I built; 

but they did not know that the third line was, — 

These are the folks that worry the man 
That lives in the house that I built. 

I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no 
chickens ; but I feared the men-harriers rather. 



VISITORS WS 

I had more cheering visitors than the last. 
Children come a-berrying, railroad men taking 
a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts, fisher- 
men and hunters, poets and philosophers, in 
short, all honest pilgrims, who came out to the 
woods for freedom's sake, and really left the vil- 
lage behind, I was ready to greet with, — '* Wel- 
come, Englishmen! welcome. Englishmen!" 
for I had had communication with that race. 



VII 

THE BEANFIELD 

MEANWHILE my beans, the length of 
whose rows, added together, was seven 
miles already planted, were impatient 
to be hoed, for the earliest had grown consider- 
ably before the latest were in the ground; in- 
deed, they were not easily to be put off. What 
was the meaning of this so steady and self-re- 
specting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. 
I came to love my rows, my beans, though so 
many more than I wanted. They attached me 
to the earth, and so I got strength like Antseus. 
But why should I raise them ? Only Heaven 
knows. This was my curious labor all summer, 
— to make this portion of the earth's surface, 
which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, 
johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits 
and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. 
What shall I learn of beans or beans of me ? I 
cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have 
an eye to them; and this is my day's work. It 
is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are 
the dews and rains which water this drv soil, and 



THE BEANFIELD 205 

what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the 
most part is lean and effete. My enemies are 
worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. 
The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an 
acre clean. But what right had I to oust johns- 
wort and the rest, and break up their ancient 
herb garden.? Soon, however, the remaining 
beans will be too tough for them, and go for- 
ward to meet new foes. 

When I was four years old, as I well remem- 
ber, I was brought from Boston to this my 
native town, through these very woods and this 
field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes 
stamped on my memory. And now to-night my 
flute has waked the echoes over that very water. 
The pines still stand here older than I; or, if 
some have fallen, I have cooked my supper with 
their stumps, and a new growth is rising all 
around, preparing another aspect for new in- 
fant eyes. Almost the same johnswort springs 
from the same perennial root in this pasture, 
and even I have at length helped to clothe that 
fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and 
one of the results of my presence and influence 
is seen in these bean leaves, corn blades, and 
potato vines. 

I planted about two acres and a half of up- 
land ; and as it was only about fifteen years since 
the land was cleared, and I myself had got out 
two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it 



206 WALDEN 

any manure; but in the course of the summer 
it appeared by the arrow-heads which I turned 
up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had an- 
ciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans 
ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to 
some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very 
crop. 

Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run 
across the road, or the sun had got above the 
shrub-oaks, while all the dew was on, though 
the farmers warned me against it, — I would 
advise you to do all your work if possible while 
the dew is on, — I began to level the ranks of 
haughty weeds in my beanfield and throw dust 
upon their heads. Early in the morning I 
worked barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist 
in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the 
day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun 
lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly back- 
ward and forward over that yellow gravelly up- 
land, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, 
the one end terminating in a shrub-oak copse 
where I could rest in the shade, the other in a 
blackberry field where the green berries deep- 
ened their tints by the time I had made another 
bout. Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil 
about the bean stems, and encouraging this 
weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil 
express its summer .thought in bean leaves and 
blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper 



THE BEANFIELD 207 

and millet grass, making the earth say beans 
instead of grass, — this was my daily work. As 
I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired 
men or boys, or improved implements of hus- 
bandry, I was much slower, and became much 
more intimate with my beans than usual. But 
labor of the hands, even when pursued to the 
verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst 
form of idleness. It has a constant and imper- 
ishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a 
classic result. A very agricola lahoriosus was 
I to travellers bound westward through Lincoln 
and Wayland to nobody knows where; they 
sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on 
knees, and reins loosely hanging in festoons; I 
the home-staying laborious native of the soil. 
But soon my homestead was out of their sight 
and thought. It was the only open and culti- 
vated field for a great distance on either side of 
the road; so they made the most of it; and 
sometimes the man in the field heard more of 
travellers' gossip and comment than was meant 
for his ear: ** Beans so late! peas so late!" — 
for I continued to plant when others had begun 
to hoe, — the ministerial husbandman had not 
suspected it. "Corn, my boy, for fodder; corn 
for fodder." *'Does he live there .^" asks the 
black bonnet of the gray coat; and the hard- 
featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to 
inquire what you are doing where he sees no 



208 WALDEN 

manure in the furrow, and recommends a little 
chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be 
ashes or plaster. But here were two acres and a 
half of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two 
hands to draw it, — there being an aversion to 
other carts and horses, — and chip dirt far away. 
Fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared it 
aloud with the fields which they had passed, so 
that I came to know how I stood in the agricul- 
tural world. This was one field not in Mr. Cole- 
man's report. And, by the way, who estimates 
the value of the crop which Nature yields in the 
still wilder fields unimproved by man ? The crop 
of English hay is carefully weighed, the moist- 
ure calculated, the silicates and the potash; but 
in all dells and pond holes in the woods and 
pastures and swamps grows a rich and various 
crop only unreaped by man. Mine was, as it 
were, the connecting link between wild and cul- 
tivated fields; as some states are civilized, and 
others half -civilized, and others savage or bar- 
barous, so my field was, though not in a bad 
sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans 
cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive 
state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the 
Rans des V aches for them. 

Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a 
birch, sings the brown-thrasher — or red mavis, 
as some love to call him — all the morning, glad 
of your society, that would find out another 



THE BEANFIELD 209 

farmer's field if yours were not here. While you 
are planting the seed, he cries, — "Drop it, 
drop it, — cover it up, cover it up, — pull it up, 
pull it up, pull it up." But this was not corn, 
and so it was safe from such enemies as he. 
You may wonder what his rigmarole, his ama- 
teur Paganini performances on one string or 
on twenty, have to do with your planting, and 
yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was 
a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had 
entire faith. 

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows 
mth my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchroni- 
cled nations who in primeval years lived under 
these heavens, and their small implements of 
war and hunting were brought to the light of 
this modern day. They lay mingled with other 
natural stones, some of which bore the marks 
of having been burned by Indian fires, and some 
by the sun, and also bits of pottery and glass 
brought hither by the recent cultivators of the 
soil. WTien my hoe tinkled against the stones, 
that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and 
was an* accompaniment to my labor w^hich 
yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It 
was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed 
beans; and I remembered wath as much pity 
as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaint- 
ances who had gone to the city to attend the 
oratorios. The night-hawk circled overhead in 



210 WALDEN 

the sunny afternoons — for I sometimes made 
a day of it — like a mote in the eye, or in heav- 
en's eye, falling from time to time with a swoop 
and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at 
last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless 
cope remained; small imps that fill the air and 
lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or 
rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found 
them; graceful and slender, like ripples caught 
up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the 
wind to float in the heavens; such kindredship 
is in Nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the 
wave which he sails over and surveys, those his 
perfect air-inflated wings answering to the ele- 
mental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or some- 
times I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling 
high in the sky, alternately soaring and de- 
scending, approaching and leaving one another, 
as if they were the embodiment of my own 
thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of 
wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a 
slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier 
haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe 
turned up a sluggish, portentous, and outlandish 
spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the 
Nile, yet our contemporary. Wlien I paused to 
lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard 
and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the in- 
exhaustible entertainment which the country 
offers. 



THE BEANFIELD 211 

On gala days the town fires its great guns, 
which echo like popguns to these woods, and 
some waifs of martial music occasionally pene- 
trate thus far. To me, away there in my bean- 
field at the other end of the town, the big guns 
sounded as if a puff ball had burst; and when 
there was a military turnout of which I was 
ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all 
the day of some sort of itching and disease in 
the horizon as if some eruption would break out 
there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, un- 
til at length some more favorable puff of wind, 
making haste over the fields and up the Way- 
land road, brought me information of the "train- 
ers." It seemed by the distant hum as if 
somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the 
neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, by a 
faint tintinnahuluTn upon the most sonorous of 
their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call 
them down into the hive again. And when the 
sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, 
and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I 
knew that they had got the last drone of them 
all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now 
their minds were bent on the honey with which 
it was smeared. 

I felt proud to know that the liberties of Mas- 
sachusetts and of our fatherland were in such 
safe keeping ; and as I turned to my hoeing again 
I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, 



212 WALDEN 

and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm 
trust in the future. 

When there were several bands of musicians, 
it sounded as if all the village was a vast bellows, 
and all the buildings expanded and collapsed 
alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a 
really noble and inspiring strain that reached 
these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, 
and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a 
good relish, — for why should we always stand 
for trifles ? — and looked round for a wood- 
chuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry upon. 
These martial strains seemed as far away as 
Palestine, and reminded me of a march of 
crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tan- 
tivy and tremulous motion of the elm-tree 
tops which overhang the village. This was one 
of the great days; though the sky had from 
my clearing only the same everlastingly great 
look that it wears daily, and I saw no differ- 
ence in it. 

It was a singular experience, that long ac- 
quaintance which I cultivated with beans, what 
with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and 
threshing, and picking over, and selling them, — 
the last was the hardest of all, — I might add 
eating, for I did taste. I was determined to 
know beans. When they were growing, I used 
to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, 
and commonly spent the rest of the day about 



V^JP^^^ 










a 



THE BEANFIELD 213 

other affairs. Consider the intimate and curi- 
ous acquaintance one makes with various kinds 
of weeds, — it will bear some iteration in the 
account, for there was no little iteration in the 
labor, — disturbing their delicate organizations 
so ruthlessly, and making such invidious dis- 
tinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks 
of one species, and sedulously cultivating an- 
other. That 's Roman wormwood, — that 's pig- 
weed, — that 's sorrel, — that 's piper-grass, — 
have at him, chop him up, turn his roots up- 
ward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the 
shade, if you do he '11 turn himself t'other side 
up and be as green as a leek in two days. A 
long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those 
Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their 
side. Daily the beans saw me come to their 
rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of 
their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy 
dead. Many a lusty crest- waving Hector, that 
towered a whole foot above his crowding com- 
rades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the 
dust. 

Those summer days which some of my con- 
temporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston 
and Rome, and others to contemplation in India, 
and others to trade in London or New York, I 
thus, with the other farmers of New England, 
devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans 
to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far 



214 WALDEN 

as beans are concerned, whether they mean 
porridge or voting, and exchanged them for 
rice; but, perchance, as some must work in 
fields if only for the sake of tropes and expres- 
sion, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was 
on the whole a rare amusement, which, con- 
tinued too long, might have become a dissipa- 
tion. Though I gave them no manure, and did 
not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusually 
well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the 
end, ** there being in truth," as Evelyn says, *'no 
compost or Isetation whatsoever comparable to 
this continual motion, repastination, and turn- 
ing of the mould with the spade." *'The earth," 
he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a 
certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the 
salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives 
it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir 
we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings 
and other sordid temperings being but the 
vicars succedaneous to this improvement." 
Moreover, this being one of those "worn-out 
and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sab- 
bath," had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby 
thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits" from the 
air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans. 

But to be more particular, for it is complained 
that Mr. Coleman has reported chiefly the ex- 
pensive experiments of gentlemen farmers, my 
outgoes were, — 



THE BEANFIELD 215 

For a hoe $0 54 

Ploughing, harrowing, and furrowing ... 7 50 Too much 

Beans for seed 3 12^ 

Potatoes " 1 33 

Peas " 40 

Turnip seed 06 

White line for crow fence 02 

Horse cultivator and boy three hours ... 1 00 

Horse and cart to get crop 75 

In all $14 72i 

My income was (patrem familias vendacem, 
non emacem esse oportet), from 

Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold . . . $16 94 

Five " large potatoes 2 50 

Nine " small " 2 25 

Grass 1 00 

Stalks 75 

In all $23 44 

Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of $8.71^. 

This is the result of my experience in raising 
beans. Plant the common small white bush 
bean about the first of June, in rows three feet 
by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select 
fresh round and unmixed seed. First look out 
for worms, and supply vacancies by planting 
anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is 
an exposed place, for they will nibble off the 
earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go; 
and again, when the young tendrils make their 
appearance, they have notice of it, and will 
shear them off with both buds and young pods. 



216 WALDEN 

sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all, 
harvest as early as possible, if you would escape 
frosts and have a fair and salable crop; you 
may save much loss by this means. 

This further experience also I gained. I said 
to myself, I will not plant beans and corn with 
so much industry another summer, but such 
seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, 
simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and 
see if they will not grow in this soil, even with 
less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for 
surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. 
Alas ! I said this to myself ; but now another 
summer is gone, and another, and another, and 
I am obliged to say to you. Reader, that the 
seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the 
seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had 
lost their vitality and so did not come up. Com- 
monly men will only be brave as their fathers 
were brave, or timid. This generation is very 
sure to plant corn and beans each new year 
precisely as the Indians did centuries ago, and 
taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a 
fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my 
astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for 
the seventieth time at least, and not for himself 
to lie down in ! But why should not the New 
Englander try new adventures, and not lay so 
much stress on his grain, his potato and grass 
crop, and his orchards, — raise other crops 



THE BEANFIELD 217 

than these ? Why concern ourselves so much 
about our beans for seed, and not be concerned 
at all about a new generation of men ? We 
should really be fed and cheered if when we met 
a man we were sure to see that some of the 
qualities which I have named, which we all 
prize more than those other productions, but 
which are for the most part broadcast and float- 
ing in the air, had taken root and grown in him. 
Here comes such a subtile and ineffable quality, 
for instance, as truth or justice, though the 
slightest amount or new variety of it, along the 
road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to 
send home such seeds as these, and Congress 
help to distribute them over all the land. We 
should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. 
We should never cheat and insult and banish 
one another by our meanness, if there were 
present the kernel of worth and friendliness. 
We should not meet thus in haste. Most men 
I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have 
time; they are busy about their beans. We 
would not deal with a man thus plodding ever, 
leaning on a hoe or a spade as a staff between 
his work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen 
out of the earth, something more than erect, 
like swallows alighted and walking on the 
ground : — 

"And as he spake, his wings would now and then 
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again,'* 



218 WALDEN 

so that we should suspect that we might be con- 
versing with an angel. Bread may not always 
nourish us ; but it always does us good, it even 
takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us 
supple and buoyant, when we knew not what 
ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or 
Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. 

Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at 
least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; 
but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heed- 
lessness by us, our object being to have large 
farms and large crops merely. We have no 
festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not ex- 
cepting our Cattle-shows and so-called Thanks- 
givings, by which the farmer expresses a sense 
of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded 
of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the 
feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to 
Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal 
Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and 
a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, 
of regarding the soil as property, or the means 
of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is 
deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and 
the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He 
knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that 
the profits of agriculture are particularly pious 
or just {maximeque pius qucestus), and according 
to Varro, the old Romans "called the same 
earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they 



THE BEANFIELD 219 

who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and 
that they alone were left of the race of King 
Saturn." 

We are wont to forget that the sun looks on 
our cultivated fields and on the prairies and 
forests without distinction. They all reflect and 
absorb his rays alike, and the former make but 
a small part of the glorious picture which he 
beholds in his daily course. In his view the earth 
is all equally cultivated like a garden. There- 
fore we should receive the benefit of his light 
and heat with a corresponding trust and mag- 
nanimity. What though I value the seed of 
these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the 
year.? This broad field which I have looked 
at so long looks not to me as the principal culti- 
vator, but away from me to influences more 
genial to it, which water and make it green. 
These beans have results which are not harvested 
by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks 
partly.? The ear of wheat (in Latin spica, 
obsoletely speca, from spe, hope) should not be 
the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel 
or grain {granum, from gerendo, bearing) is not 
all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest 
fail ? Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance 
of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the 
birds.? It matters little comparatively whether 
the fields fill the farmer's barns. The true 
husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the 



220 WALDEN 

squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods 
will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish 
his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim 
to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his 
mind not only his first but his last fruits also. 



VIII. 

THE VILLAGE 

AFTER hoeing, or perhaps reading and 
writing, in the forenoon, I usually bathed 
again in the pond, swimming across one 
of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of 
labor from my person, or smoothed out the last 
wrinkle which study had made, and for the 
afternoon was absolutely free. Every day or 
two I strolled to the village to hear some of the 
gossip which is incessantly going on there, 
circulating either from mouth to mouth, or 
from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken 
in homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing 
in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peep- 
ing of frogs. As I walked in the woods to see 
the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village 
to see the men and boys; instead of the wind 
among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In 
one direction from my house there was a colony 
of muskrats in the river meadows; under the 
grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other 
horizon was a village of busy men, as curious 
to me as if they had been prairie dogs, each 
sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running 



222 WALDEN 

over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there fre- 
quently to observe their habits. The village 
appeared to me a great news room; and on 
one side to support it, as once at Redding & 
Company's on State Street, they kept nuts and 
raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries. 
Some have such a vast appetite for the former 
commodity, that is, the news, and such sound 
digestive organs, that they can sit forever in 
public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer 
and whisper through them like the Etesian winds, 
or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numb- 
ness and insensibility to pain, — otherwise it 
would be often painful to hear, — without affect- 
ing the consciousness. I hardly ever failed, 
when I rambled through the village, to see a 
row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder 
sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined 
forward and their eyes glancing along the line 
this way and that, from time to time, with a 
voluptuous expression, or else leaning against 
a barn with their hands in their pockets, like 
caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, being 
commonly out of doors, heard whatever was in 
the wind. These are the coarsest mills, in 
which all gossip is first rudely digested or 
cracked up before it is emptied into finer and 
more delicate hoppers within doors. I observed 
that the vitals of the village were the grocery, 
the bar-room, the post-office, and the bank; 



^ 



THE VILLAGE 223 

and, as a necessary part of the machinery, they 
kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire-engine, at con- 
venient places ; and the houses were so arranged 
as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and 
fronting one another, so that every traveller 
had to run the gantlet, and every man, woman, 
and child might get a lick at him. Of course, 
those who were stationed nearest to the head 
of the line, where they could most see and be 
seen, and have the first blow at him, paid the 
highest prices for their places; and the few 
straggling inhabitants in the outskirts, where 
long gaps in the line began to occur, and the 
traveller could get over walls or turn aside into 
cow paths, and so escape, paid a very slight 
ground or window tax. Signs were hung out 
on all sides to allure him; some to catch him 
by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling 
cellar; some by the fancy, as the dry goods 
store and the jeweller's; and others by the hair 
or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoe- 
maker, or the tailor. Besides, there was a still 
more terrible standing invitation to call at 
every one of these houses, and company expected 
about these times. For the most part I escaped 
wonderfully from these dangers, either by pro- 
ceeding at once boldly and without deliberation 
to the goal, as is recommended to those who run 
the gantlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high 
things, like Orpheus, who, "loudly singing the 



224 WALDEN 

praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned the 
voices of the Sirens, and kept out of danger." 
Sometimes I bolted suddenly, and nobody 
could tell my whereabouts, for I did not stand 
much about gracefulness, and never hesitated 
at a gap in the fence. I was even accustomed 
to make an irruption into some houses, where 
I was well entertained, and after learning the 
kernels and very last sieve-ful of news, what 
had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, 
and whether the world was likely to hold to- 
gether much longer, I was let out through the 
rear avenues, and so escaped to the woods again. 
It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in 
town, to launch myself into the night, especially 
if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail 
from some bright village parlor or lecture room, 
with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my 
shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, 
having made all tight without and withdrawn 
under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, 
leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even 
tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. I 
had many a genial thought by the cabin fire 
"as I sailed." I was never cast away nor dis- 
tressed in any weather, though I encountered 
some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, 
even in common nights, than most suppose. 
I frequently had to look up at the opening be- 
tween the trees above the path in order to learn 




A winter road near Thoreaus cabin 



THE VILLAGE 225 

my route, and, where there was no cart-path, 
to feel with my feet the faint track which I had 
worn, or steer by the known relation of partic- 
ular trees which I felt with my hands, passing 
between two pines for instance, not more than 
eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, 
invariably in the darkest night. Sometimes, 
after coming home thus late in a dark and 
muggy night, when my feet felt the path which 
my eyes could not see, dreaming and absent- 
minded all the way, until I was aroused by hav- 
ing to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not 
been able to recall a single step of my walk, and 
I have thought that perhaps my body would 
find its way home if its master should forsake 
it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth with- 
out assistance. Several times, when a visitor 
chanced to stay into evening, and it proved a 
dark night, I was obliged to conduct him to the 
cart-path in the rear of the house, and then point 
out to him the direction he was to pursue, and 
in keeping which he was to be guided rather by 
his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I 
directed thus on their way two young men who 
had been fishing in the pond. They lived about 
a mile off through the woods, and were quite 
used to the route. A day or two after one of 
them told me that they wandered about the 
greater part of the night, close by their own 
premises, and did not get home till toward 



226 WALDEN 

morning, by which time, as there had been 
several heavy showers in the meanwhile, and 
the leaves were very wet, they were drenched 
to their skins. I have heard of many going astray 
even in the village streets, when the darkness 
was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, 
as the saying is. Some who live in the out- 
skirts, having come to town a-shopping in their 
wagons, have been obliged to put up for the 
night; and gentlemen and ladies making a call 
have gone half a mile out of their way, feeling 
the sidewalk only with their feet, and not know- 
ing when they turned. It is a surprising and 
memorable, as well as valuable experience, to 
be lost in the woods any time. Often in a snow 
storm, even by day, one will come out upon a 
well-known road and yet find it impossible to 
tell which way leads to the village. Though he 
knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, 
he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as 
strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia. 
By night, of course, the perplexity is infinitely 
greater. In our most trivial walks, we are con- 
stantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots 
by certain well-known beacons and head-lands, 
and if we go beyond our usual course we still 
carry in our minds the bearing of some neigh- 
boring cape ; and not till we are completely lost, 
or turned round, — for a man needs only to be 
turned round once with his eyes shut in this 



THE VILLAGE 227 

world to be lost, — do we appreciate the vast- 
ness and strangeness of Nature. Every man 
has to learn the points of compass again as often 
as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstrac- 
tion. Not till we are lost, in other words, not 
till we have lost the world, do we begin to find 
ourselves, and realize where we are and the 
infinite extent of our relations. 

One afternoon, near the end of the first 
summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe 
from the cobbler's, I was seized and put into 
jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did 
not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, 
the state, which buys and sells men, women, 
and children, like cattle at the door of its senate- 
house. I had gone down to the woods for other 
purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will 
pursue and paw him with their dirty institu- 
tions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong 
to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, 
I might have resisted forcibly with more or less 
effect, might have run "amok" against society; 
but I preferred that society should run ''amok" 
against me, it being the desperate party. How- 
ever, I was released the next day, obtained my 
mended shoe, and returned to the woods in 
season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair- 
Haven Hill. I was never molested by any 
person but those who represented the state. 
I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which 



228 WALDEN 

held my papers, not even a nail to put over my 
latch or windows. I never fastened my door 
night or day, though I was to be absent several 
days; not even when the next fall I spent a 
fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my 
house was more respected than if it had been 
surrounded by a file of soldiers. The tired 
rambler could rest and warm himself by my 
fire, the literary amuse himself with the few 
books on my table, or the curious, by opening 
my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, 
and what prospect I had of a supper. Yet, 
though many people of every class came this 
way to the pond, I suffered no serious incon- 
venience from these sources, and I never missed 
anything but one small book, a volume of Homer, 
which perhaps was improperly gilded, and this 
I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this 
time. I am convinced that if all men were to 
live as simply as I then did, thieving and rob- 
bery would be unknown. These take place only 
in communities where some have got more than 
is sufficient while others have not enough. The 
Pope's Homers would soon get properly dis- 
tributed. — 

"Nee bella fuerunt, 
Faginiis astabat dum scyphus ante dapes." 

*'Nor wars did men molest, 
When only beechen bowls were in request.** 



THE VILLAGE 229 

"You who govern public affairs, what need have 
you to employ punishments? Love virtue, and 
the people will be virtuous. The virtues of a 
superior man are like the wind ; the virtues of a 
common man are like the grass ; the grass, when 
the wind passes over it, bends." 



IX 

THE PONDS 

SOMETIMES, having had a surfeit of hu- 
man society and gossip, and worn out 
all my village friends, I rambled still 
farther westward than I habitually dwell, into 
yet more unfrequented parts of the town, '*to 
fresh woods and pastures new," or, while the 
sun was setting, made my supper of huckle- 
berries and blueberries on Fair-Haven Hill, and 
laid up a store for several days. The fruits do 
not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of 
them, nor to him who raises them for the market. 
There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take 
that way. If you would know the flavor of 
huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. 
It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have 
tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. 
A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have 
not been known there since they grew on her 
three hills. The ambrosial and essential part of 
the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off 
in the market cart, and they become mere prov- 
ender. As long as Eternal Justice reigns, not one 



'll 




In the woods near Fair- Haven Hill 



THE PONDS 231 

innocent huckleberry can be transported thither 
from the country's hills. 

Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the 
day, I joined some impatient companion who 
had been fishing on the pond since morning, as 
silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, 
and, after practising various kinds of philosophy, 
had concluded commonly, by the time I arrived, 
that he belonged to the ancient sect of Coeno- 
bites. There was one older man, an excellent 
fisher and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who 
was pleased to look upon my house as a building 
erected for the convenience of fishermen ; and I 
was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway 
to arrange his lines. Once in a while we sat to- 
gether on the pond, he at one end of the boat, 
and I at the other ; but not many words passed 
between us, for he had grown deaf in his later 
years, but he occasionally hummed a psalm, 
which harmonized well enough with my philos- 
ophy. Our intercourse was thus altogether one 
of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to re- 
member than if it had been carried on by speech. 
WTien, as was commonly the case, I had none to 
commune with, I used to raise the echoes by 
striking with a paddle on the side of my boat, 
filling the surrounding woods with circling and 
dilating sound, stirring them up as the keeper of 
a menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited a 
growl from every wooded vale and hill side. 



232 WALDEN 

In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat 
playing the flute, and saw the perch, which I 
seemed to have charmed, hovering around me, 
and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, 
which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest. 
Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously, 
from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a 
companion, and making a fire close to the water's 
edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we 
caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a 
thread ; and when we had done, far in the night, 
threw the burning brands high into the air like 
sky-rockets, which, coming down into the pond, 
were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were 
suddenly groping in total darkness. Through 
this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the 
haunts of men again. But now I had made my 
home by the shore. 

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor 
till the family had all retired, I have returned to 
the woods, and, partly with a view to the next 
day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing 
from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls 
and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the 
creaking note of some unknown bird close at 
hand. These experiences were very memorable 
and valuable to me, — anchored in forty feet of 
water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, 
surrounded sometimes by thousands of small 
perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with 



THE PONDS 233 

their tails in the moonlight, and communicating 
by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal 
fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, 
or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the 
pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now 
and then feeling a slight vibration along it, in- 
dicative of some life prowling about its extrem- 
ity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, 
and slow to make up its mind. At length you 
slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned 
pout squeaking and squirming to the upper 
air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, 
when your thoughts had wandered to vast and 
cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this 
faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams 
and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I 
might next cast my line upward into the air, as 
well as downward into this element which was 
scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes 
as it were with one hook. 

The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, 
and, though very beautiful, does not approach to 
grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has 
not long frequented it, or lived by its shore ; yet 
this pond is so remarkable for its depth and 
purity as to merit a particular description. It 
is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long 
and a mile and three quarters in circumference, 
and contains about sixty-one and a half acres; 
a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak 



234 WALDEN 

woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except 
by the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding 
hills rise abruptly from the water to the height 
of forty to eighty feet, though on the southeast 
and east they attain to about one hundred and 
one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a 
quarter and a third of a mile. They are exclu- 
sively woodland. All our Concord waters have 
two colors at least, one when viewed at a dis- 
tance, and another, more proper, close at hand. 
The first depends more on the light, and follows 
the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they ap- 
pear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, 
and at a great distance all appear alike. In stormy 
weather they are sometimes of a dark slate color. 
The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and 
green another without any perceptible change in 
the atmosphere. I have seen our river, when, 
the landscape being covered with snow, both 
water and ice were almost as green as grass. 
Some consider blue *'to be the color of pure 
water, whether liquid or solid." But, looking 
directly down into our waters from a boat, they 
are seen to be of very different colors. Walden is 
blue at one time and green at another, even from 
the same point of view. Lying between the earth 
and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. 
Viewed from a hill top it reflects the color of the 
sky, but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint 
next the shore where you can see the sand, then 



THE PONDS 235 

a light green, which gradually deepens to a uni- 
form dark green in the body of the pond. In some 
lights, viewed even from a hill top, it is of a 
vivid screen next the shore. Some have referred 
this to the reflection of the verdure; but it is 
equally green there against the railroad sand- 
bank, and in the spring, before the leaves are ex- 
panded, and it may be simply the result of the 
prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. 
Such is the color of its iris. This is that portion, 
also, where in the spring, the ice being warmed 
by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, 
and also transmitted through the earth, melts 
first and forms a narrow canal about the still 
frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when 
much agitated, in clear weather, so that the 
surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the 
right angle, or because there is more light mixed 
with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker 
blue than the sky itself ; and at such a time, being 
on its surface, and looking with divided vision, 
so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a 
matchless and indescribable light blue, such as 
watered or changeable silks and sword blades 
suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alter- 
nating with the original dark green on the oppo- 
site sides of the waves, which last appeared but 
muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous greenish 
blue, as I remember it, like those patches of the 
winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west 



236 WALDEN 

before sundown. Yet a single glass of its water 
held up to the light is as colorless as an equal 
quantity of air. It is well-known that a large 
plate of glass will have a green tint, owing, as 
the makers say, to its "body," but a small piece 
of the same will be colorless. How large a body 
of Walden water would be required to reflect a 
green tint I have never proved. The water of 
our river is black or a very dark brown to one 
looking directly down on it, and like that of most 
ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it 
a yellowish tinge; but this water is of such 
crystalline purity that the body of the bather 
appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more un- 
natural, which, as the limbs are magnified and 
distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, 
making fit studies for a Michael Angelo. 

The water is so transparent that the bottom 
can easily be discerned at the depth of twenty- 
five or thirty feet. Paddling over it, you may see 
many feet beneath the surface the schools of 
perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, 
yet the former easily distinguished by their 
transverse bars, and you think that they must 
be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. 
Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I had 
been cutting holes through the ice in order to 
catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my 
axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius 
had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly 



1 







cj 



e 



THE PONDS 237 

into one of the holes, where the water was twenty- 
five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the 
ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the 
axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with 
its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with 
the pulse of the pond ; and there it might have 
stood erect and swaying till in the course of time 
the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. 
Making another hole directly over it with an ice 
chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest 
birch which I could find in the neighborhood 
with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I 
attached to its end, and, letting it down care- 
fully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and 
drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled 
the axe out again. 

The shore is composed of a belt of smooth 
rounded white stones like paving stones, except- 
ing one or two short sand beaches, and is so steep 
that in many places a single leap will carry you 
into water over your head ; and were it not for its 
remarkable transparency, that would be the last 
to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the oppo- 
site side. Some think it is bottomless. It is no- 
where muddy, and a casual observer would say 
that there were no weeds at all in it ; and of notice- 
able plants, except in the little meadows recently 
overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, 
a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bul- 
rush, nor even a lily, yellow or white, but only a 



238 WALDEN 

few small heart-leaves and potamogetons, and 
perhaps a water-target or two ; all which however 
a bather might not perceive ; and these plants are 
clean and bright like the element they grow in. 
The stones extend a rod or two into the water, 
and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the 
deepest parts, where there is usually a little 
sediment, probably from the decay of the leaves, 
which have been wafted on to it so many succes- 
sive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up 
on anchors even in midwinter. 

We have one other pond just like this. White 
Pond in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half 
miles westerly; but, though I am acquainted 
with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of 
this centre, I do not know a third of this pure 
and well-like character. Successive nations per- 
chance have drunk at, admired, and fathomed 
it, and passed away, and still its water is green 
and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting 
spring ! Perhaps on that spring morning when 
Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden 
Pond was already in existence, and even then 
breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied 
with mist and a southerly wind, and covered 
with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not 
heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes suf- 
ficed them. Even then it had commenced to 
rise and fall, and had clarified its waters, and 
colored them of the hue they now wear, and ob- 



THE PONDS 239 

tained a patent of heaven to be the only Walden 
Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. 
Who knows in how many unremembered na- 
tions' literatures this has been the Castalian 
Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in 
the Golden Age ? It is a gem of the first water 
which Concord wears in her coronet. 

Yet perchance the first who came to this well 
have left some trace of their footsteps. I have 
been surprised to detect encircling the pond, 
even where a thick wood has just been cut down 
on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep 
hill side, alternately rising and falling, approach- 
ing and receding from the water's edge, as old 
probably as the race of man here, worn by the 
feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to 
time unwittingly trodden by the present occu- 
pants of the land. This is particularly distinct 
to one standing on the middle of the pond in 
winter, just after a light snow has fallen, appear- 
ing as a clear undulating white line, unobscured 
by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter 
of a mile off in many places where in summer it is 
hardly distinguishable close at hand. The snow 
reprints it, as it were, in clear white type alto- 
relievo. The ornamented grounds of villas which 
will one day be built here may still preserve some 
trace of this. 

The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly 
or not, and within what period, nobody knows. 



240 WALDEN 

though, as usual, many pretend to know. It is 
commonly higher in the winter and lower in the 
summer, though not corresponding to the gen- 
eral wet and dryness. I can remember when it 
was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at 
least five feet higher, than when I lived by it. 
There is a narrow sand-bar running into it, very 
deep water on one side, on which I helped boil 
a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main 
shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been 
possible to do for twenty-five years; and on the 
other hand, my friends used to listen with incre- 
dulity when I told them that a few years later I 
was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded 
cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only 
shore they knew, which place was long since 
converted into a meadow. But the pond has 
risen steadily for two years, and now, in the 
summer of '52, is just five feet higher than when 
I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years 
ago, and fishing goes on again in the meadow. 
This makes a difference of level, at the outside, 
of six or seven feet; and yet the water shed by 
the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, 
and this overflow must be referred to causes 
which affect the deep springs. This same sum- 
mer the pond has begun to fall again. It is 
remarkable that this fluctuation, whether period- 
ical or not, appears thus to require many years 
for its accomplishment. I have observed one 



THE PONDS 241 

rise and a part of two falls, and I expect that a 
dozen or fifteen years hence the water will again 
be as low as I have ever known it. Flint's Pond, 
a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance oc- 
casioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller 
intermediate ponds also, sympathize with Walden, 
and recently attained their greatest height at 
the same time with the latter. The same is true, 
as far as my observation goes, of White Pond. 
This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals 
serves this use at least: the water standing at 
this great height for a year or more, though it 
makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the 
shrubs and trees which have sprung up about 
its edge since the last rise, pitch-pines, birches, 
alders, aspens, and others, and, falhng again, 
leaves an unobstructed shore; for, unlike many 
ponds, and all waters which are subject to a 
daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is 
lowest. On the side of the pond next my house, 
a row of pitch-pines fifteen feet high has been 
killed and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus 
a stop put to their encroachments; and their 
size indicates how many years have elapsed 
since the last rise to this height. By this fluctu- 
ation the pond asserts its title to a shore, and 
thus the sJwre is shorn, and the trees cannot hold 
it by right of possession. These are the lips of 
the lake on which no beard grows. It licks its 
chaps from time to time. WTben the water is at 



242 WALDEN 

its height, the alders, willows, and maples send 
forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long 
from all sides of their stems in the water, and to 
the height of three or four feet from the ground, 
in the effort to maintain themselves ; and I have 
known the high blueberry bushes about the 
shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear 
an abundant crop under these circumstances. 

Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore 
became so regularly paved. My townsmen have 
all heard the tradition, the oldest people tell me 
that they heard it in their youth, that anciently 
the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a 
hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as 
the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they 
used much profanity, as the story goes, though 
this vice is one of which the Indians were never 
guilty, and while they were thus engaged the 
hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old 
squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her 
the pond was named. It has been conjectured 
that when the hill shook these stones rolled 
down its side and became the present shore. It 
is very certain, at any rate, that once there was 
no pond here, and now there is one; and this 
Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with 
the account of that ancient settler whom I have 
mentioned, who remembers so well when he 
first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin 
vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel 







^ 






THE PONDS 243 

pointed steadily downward, and he concluded 
to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still 
think that they are hardly to be accounted for 
by the action of the waves on these hills ; but I 
observe that the surrounding hills are remark- 
ably full of the same kind of stones, so that they 
have been obliged to pile them up in walls on 
both sides of the railroad cut nearest the pond; 
and, moreover, there are most stones where the 
shore is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it 
is no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver. 
If the name was not derived from that of some 
English locality, — Saffron Walden, for in- 
stance, — one might suppose that it was called, 
originally, Walled-in Pond. 

The pond was my well ready dug. For four 
months in the year its water is as cold as it is 
pure at all times ; and I think that it is then as 
good as any, if not the best, in the town. In the 
winter, all water which is exposed to the air is 
colder than springs and wells which are pro- 
tected from it. The temperature of the pond 
water which had stood in the room where I sat 
from five o'clock in the afternoon till noon the 
next day, the sixth of March, 1846, the ther- 
mometer having been up to 65° or 70° some of 
the time, owing partly to the sun on the roof, 
was 42°, or one degree colder than the water of 
one of the coldest wells in the village just drawn. 
The temperature of the Boiling Spring the same 



244 WALDEN 

day was 45°, or the warmest of any water tried, 
though it is the coldest that I know of in summer, 
when, besides, shallow and stagnant surface 
water is not mingled with it. Moreover, in 
summer, Walden never becomes so warm as 
most water which is exposed to the sun, on ac- 
count of its depth. In the warmest weather I 
usually placed a pailful in my cellar, where it 
became cool in the night, and remained so dur- 
ing the day; though I also resorted to a spring 
in the neighborhood. It was as good when a 
week old as the day it was dipped, and had no 
taste of the pump. Whoever camps for a week 
in summer by the shore of a pond, needs only 
bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade 
of his camp to be independent of the luxury of 
ice. 

There have been caught in Walden, pickerel, 
one weighing seven pounds, to say nothing of 
another which carried off a reel with great veloc- 
ity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight 
pounds because he did not see him, perch and 
pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, 
shiners, chivins or roach (Leuciscus pulchellus), 
a very few breams, and a couple of eels, one 
weighing four pounds, — I am thus particular 
because the weight of a fish is commonly its 
only title to fame, and these are the only eels I 
have heard of here ; — also, I have a faint recol- 
lection of a little fish some five inches long, with 



THE PONDS 245 

silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat 
dace-like in its character, which I mention here 
chiefly to link my facts to fable. Nevertheless, 
this pond is not very fertile in fish. Its pickerel, 
though not abundant, are its chief boast. I have 
seen at one time lying on the ice pickerel of at 
least three different kinds: a long and shallow 
one, steel-colored, most like those caught in the 
river; a bright golden kind, with greenish re- 
flections and remarkably deep, which is the most 
common here; and another, golden-colored, 
and shaped like the last, but peppered on the 
sides with small dark brown or black spots, in- 
termixed with a few faint blood-red ones very 
much like a trout. The specific name rehcu- 
latus would not apply to this; it should be 
guttatus rather. These are all very firm fish, 
and weigh more than their size promises. The 
shiners, pouts, and perch, also, and indeed all 
the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much 
cleaner, handsomer, and firmer fleshed than 
those in the river and most other ponds, as the 
water is purer, and they can easily be distin- 
guished from them. Probably many ichthyolo- 
gists would make new varieties of some of them. 
There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, 
and a few mussels in it; muskrats and minks 
leave their traces about it, and occasionally a 
travelling mud-turtle visits it. Sometimes, when 
I pushed off my boat in the morning, I disturbed 



246 WALDEN 

a great mud-turtle which had secreted himself 
under the boat in the night. Ducks and geese 
frequent it in the spring and fall, the white- 
bellied swallows {Hirundo hicolor) skim over it, 
and the peetweets {Totanus macularius) **teter" 
along its stony shores all summer. I have some- 
times disturbed a fishhawk sitting on a white- 
pine over the water; but I doubt if it is ever 
profaned by the wing of a gull, like Fair-Haven. 
At most, it tolerates one annual loon. These 
are all the animals of consequence which fre- 
quent it now. 

You may see from a boat, in calm weather, 
near the sandy eastern shore, where the water 
is eight or ten feet deep, and also in some other 
parts of the pond, some circular heaps half a 
dozen feet in diameter by a foot in height, con- 
sisting of small stones less than a hen's egg in 
size, where all around is bare sand. At first you 
wonder if the Indians could have formed them 
on the ice for any purpose, and so, when the 
ice melted, they sank to the bottom; but they 
are too regular and some of them plainly too 
fresh for that. They are similar to those found 
in rivers; but as there are no suckers nor lam- 
preys here, I know not by what fish they could be 
made. Perhaps they are the nests of the chivin. 
These lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom. 

The shore is irregular enough not to be mo- 
notonous. I have in my mind's eye the western 



THE PONDS 247 

indented with deep bays, the bolder northern, 
and the beautifully scalloped southern shore, 
where successive capes overlap each other and 
suggest unexplored coves between. The forest 
has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly 
beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a 
small lake amid hills which rise from the water's 
edge; for the water in which it is reflected not 
only makes the best foreground in such a case, 
but, with its winding shore, the most natural 
and agreeable boundary to it. There is no raw- 
ness nor imperfection in its edge there, as where 
the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field 
abuts on it. The trees have ample room to ex- 
pand on the water side, and each sends forth its 
most vigorous branch in that direction. There 
Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the 
eye rises by just gradations from the low shrubs 
of the shore to the highest trees. There are few 
traces of man's hand to be seen. The water 
laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago. 

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and 
expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking 
into which the beholder measures the depth of 
his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the 
shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, 
and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its 
overhanging brows. 

Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the 
east end of the pond, in a calm September after- 



248 WALDEN 

noon, when a slight haze makes the opposite 
shore line indistinct, I have seen whence came 
the expression, '*the glassy surface of a lake." 
When you invert your head, it looks like a 
thread of finest gossamer stretched across the 
valley, and gleaming against the distant pine 
woods, separating one stratum of the atmos- 
phere from another. You would think that you 
could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and 
that the swallows which skim over might perch 
on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below the 
line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. 
As you look over the pond westward you are 
obliged to employ both your hands to defend 
your eyes against the reflected as well as the true 
sun, for they are equally bright ; and if, between 
the two, you survey its surface critically, it is 
literally as smooth as glass, except where the 
skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over 
its whole extent, by their motions in the sun pro- 
duce the finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, per- 
chance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have said, 
a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be 
that in the distance a fish describes an arc of 
three or four feet in the air, and there is one 
bright flash where it emerges, and another 
where it strikes the water ; sometimes the whole 
silvery arc is revealed; or here and there, per- 
haps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface, 
which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. 



THE PONDS 249 

It is like molten glass cooled but not congealed, 
and the few motes in it are pure and beautiful 
like the imperfections in glass. You may often 
detect a yet smoother and darker water, sep- 
arated from the re«t as if by an invisible cobweb, 
boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From 
a hill top you can see a fish leap in almost any 
part ; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect 
from this smooth surface but it manifestly dis- 
turbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is 
w^onderful with what elaborateness this simple 
fact is advertised, — this piscine murder will 
out, — and from my distant perch I distinguish 
the circling undulations when they are half a 
dozen rods in diameter. You can even detect a 
water-bug (Gyrinus) ceaselessly progressing over 
the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; for 
they furrow the water slightly, making a con- 
spicuous ripple bounded by two diverging lines, 
but the skaters glide over it without rippling it 
perceptibly. When the surface is considerably 
agitated there are no skaters nor water-bugs on 
it, but apparently, in calm days, they leave their 
havens and adventurously glide forth from the 
shore by short impulses till they completely 
cover it. It is a soothing employment, on one 
of those fine days in the fall when all the warmth 
of the sun is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump 
on such a height as this, overlooking the pond, 
and study the dimpling circles which are inces- 



250 WALDEN 

santly inscribed on its otherwise invisible sur- 
face amid the reflected skies and trees. Over 
this great expanse there is no disturbance but it 
is thus at once gently smoothed away and as- 
suaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the 
trembling circles seek the shore and all is smooth 
again. Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on 
the pond but it is thus reported in circling 
dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the con- 
stant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing 
of its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills 
of joy and thrills of pain are undistinguishable. 
How peaceful the phenomena of the lake ! 
Again the works of man shine as in the spring. 
Ay, every leaf and twig and stone and cobweb 
sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered 
with dew in a spring morning. Every motion 
of an oar or an insect produces a flash of light; 
and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo ! 

In such a day in September or October, Wal- 
den is a perfect forest mirror, set round with 
stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. 
Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time 
so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the sur- 
face of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. 
Nations come and go without defiling it. It is 
a mirror which no stone can crack, whose 
quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding 
Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust, 
can dim its surface ever fresh ; — a mirror in 



THE PONDS 251 

which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept 
and dusted by the sun's hazy brush, — this the 
light dust-cloth, — which retains no breath that 
is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as 
clouds high above its surface, and be reflected 
in its bosom still. 

A field of water betrays the spirit that is in 
the air. It is continually receiving new life 
and motion from above. It is intermediate in 
its nature between land and sky. On land only 
the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is 
rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze 
dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. 
It is remarkable that we can look down on its 
surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on 
the surface of air at length, and mark where a 
still subtler spirit sweeps over it. 

The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear 
in the latter part of October, when the severe 
frosts have come; and then and in November, 
usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely noth- 
ing to ripple the surface. One November after- 
noon, in the calm at the end of a rain storm of 
several days' duration, when the sky was still 
completely overcast and the air was full of mist, 
I observed that the pond was remarkably smooth, 
so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface; 
though it no longer reflected the bright tints of 
October, but the sombre November colors of 
the surrounding hills. Though I passed over it 



252 WALDEN 

as gently as possible, the slight undulations pro- 
duced by my boat extended almost as far as I 
could see, and gave a ribbed appearance to the 
reflections. But, as I was looking over the sur- 
face, I saw here and there at a distance a faint 
glimmer, as if some skater insects which had 
escaped the frosts might be collected there, or, 
perchance, the surface, being so smooth, be- 
trayed where a spring welled up from the bot- 
tom. Paddling gently to one of these places, I 
was surprised to find myself surrounded by 
myriads of small perch, about five inches long, 
of a rich bronze color in the green water, sport- 
ing there and constantly rising to the surface 
and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on 
it. In such transparent and seemingly bottom- 
less water, reflecting the clouds, I seemed to be 
floating through the air as in a balloon, and 
their swimming impressed me as a kind of flight 
or hovering, as if they were a compact flock of 
birds passing just beneath my level on the right 
or left, their fins, like sails, set all around them. 
There were many such schools in the pond, ap- 
parently improving the short season before 
winter would draw an icy shutter over their 
broad skylight, sometimes giving to the surface 
an appearance as if a slight breeze struck it, or 
a few rain-drops fell there. When I approached 
carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sud- 
den plash and rippling with their tails, as if one 



THE PONDS 253 

had struck the water with a brushy bough, and 
instantly took refuge in the depths. At length 
the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves 
began to run, and the perch leaped much higher 
than before, half out of water, a hundred black 
points, three inches long, at once above the sur- 
face. Even as late as the fifth of December, one 
year, I saw some dimples on the surface, and 
thinking it was going to rain hard immediately, 
the air being full of mist, I made haste to take 
my place at the oars and row homeward; al- 
ready the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though 
I felt none on my cheek, and I anticipated a 
thorough soaking. But suddenly the dimples 
ceased, for they were produced by the perch, 
which the noise of my oars had scared into the 
depths, and I saw their schools dimly disap- 
pearing; so I spent a dry afternoon after all. 

An old man who used to frequent this pond 
nearly sixty years ago, when it was dark with 
surrounding forests, tells me that in those days 
he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and 
other water fowl, and that there were many eagles 
about it. He came here a-fishing, and used an 
old log canoe which he found on the shore. It 
was made of two white-pine logs dug out and 
pinned together, and was cut off square at the 
ends. It was very clumsy, but lasted a great 
many years before it became water-logged and 
perhaps sank to the bottom. He did not know 



254 WALDEN 

whose it was ; it belonged to the pond. He used 
to make a cable for his anchor of strips of hick- 
ory bark tied together. An old man, a potter, 
who lived by the pond before the Revolution, 
told him once that there was an iron chest at 
the bottom, and that he had seen it. Some- 
times it would come floating up to the shore; 
but when you went toward it, it would go back 
into deep water and disappear. I was pleased 
to hear of the old log canoe, which took the place 
of an Indian one of the same material but more 
graceful construction, which perchance had first 
been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, 
fell into the water, to float there for a genera- 
tion, the most proper vessel for the lake. I re- 
member that when I first looked into these 
depths there were many large trunks to be seen 
indistinctly lying on the bottom, which had 
either been blown over formerly, or left on the 
ice at the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; 
but now they have mostly disappeared. 

When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was 
completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine 
and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape 
vines had run over the trees next the water and 
formed bowers under which a boat could pass. 
The hills which form its shores are so steep, and 
the woods on them were then so high, that, as 
you looked down from the west end, it had the 
appearance of an amphitheatre for some kind 



THE PONDS 255 

of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many an hour, 
when I was younger, floating over its surface as 
the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to 
the middle, and lying on my back across the 
seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, 
until I was aroused by the boat touching the 
sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates 
had impelled me to; days when idleness was 
the most attractive and productive industry. 
Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring 
to spend thus the most valued part of the day; 
for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours 
and summer days, and spent them lavishly; 
nor do I regret that I did not waste more of 
them in the workshop or the teacher's desk. 
But since I left those shores the wood-choppers 
have still further laid them waste, and now for 
many a year there will be no more rambling 
through the aisles of the wood, with occasional 
vistas through which you see the water. My 
Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. 
How can you expect the birds to sing when 
their groves are cut down ? 

Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and 
the old log canoe, and the dark surrounding 
woods, are gone, and the villagers, who scarcely 
know where it lies, instead of going to the pond 
to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring its water, 
which should be as sacred as the Ganges at 
least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their 



256 WALDEN 

dishes with ! — to earn their Walden by the 
turning of a cock or drawing of a plug ! That 
devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh 
is heard throughout the town, has muddied the 
Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that 
has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore; 
that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his 
belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks ! Where 
is the country's champion, the Moore of Moore 
Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust 
an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated 
pest. 

Nevertheless, of all the characters I have 
known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best 
preserves its purity. Many men have been 
likened to it, but few deserve that honor. 
Though the wood-choppers have laid bare first 
this shore and then that, and the Irish have 
built their sties by it, and the railroad has in- 
fringed on its border, and the ice-men have 
skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same 
water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the 
change is in me. It has not acquired one per- 
manent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is peren- 
nially young, and I may stand and see a swallow 
dip apparently to pick an insect from its sur- 
face as of yore. It struck me again to-night, 
as if I had not seen it almost daily for more 
than twenty years, — Why, here is Walden, 
the same woodland lake that I discovered so 







e; 



THE PONDS 257 

many years ago; where a forest was cut down 
last winter another is springing up by its shore 
as lustily as ever; the same thought is welling 
up to its surface that was then; it is the same 
liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, 
ay, and it Taay be to me. It is the work of a 
brave man, surely, in whom there was no guile ! 
He rounded this water with his hand, deepened 
and clarified it in his thought, and in his will 
bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face 
that it is visited by the same reflection; and I 
can almost say, Walden, is it you ? 

It is no dream of mine. 

To ornament a line; 

I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven 

Than I live to Walden even. 

I am its stony shore, 

And the breeze that passes o'er; 

In the hollow of my hand 

Are its water and its sand. 

And its deepest resort 

Lies high in my thought. 

The cars never pause to look at it; yet I 
fancy that the engineers and firemen and brake- 
men, and those passengers who have a season 
ticket and see it often, are better men for 
the sight. The engineer does not forget at 
night, or his nature does not, that he has be- 
held this vision of serenity and purity once at 
least during the day. Though seen but once, it 
helps to w^ash out State-street and the engine's 

9 



258 WALDEN 

soot. One proposes that it be called ''God's 
Drop." 

I have said that Walden has no visible inlet 
nor outlet, but it is on the one hand distantly 
and indirectly related to Flint's Pond, which is 
more elevated, by a chain of small ponds com- 
ing from that quarter, and on the other directly 
and manifestly to Concord River, which is 
lower, by a similar chain of ponds through 
which in some other geological period it may 
have flowed, and by a little digging, which God 
forbid, it can be made to flow thither again. If 
by living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit 
in the woods, so long, it has acquired such 
wonderful purity, who would not regret that 
the comparatively impure waters of Flint's 
Pond should be mingled with it, or itself 
should ever go to waste its sweetness in the 
ocean wave.^ 

Flint's or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our great- 
est lake and inland sea, lies about a mile east 
of Walden. It is much larger, being said to 
contain one hundred and ninety-seven acres, 
and is more fertile in fish ; but it is comparatively 
shallow, and not remarkably pure. A walk 
through the woods thither was often my recrea- 
tion. It was worth the while, if only to feel 
the wind blow on your cheek freely, and see the 
waves run, and remember the life of mariners. 



THE PONDS 259 

I went a-chestnutting there in the fall, on windy 
days, when the nuts were dropping into the 
water and were washed to my feet ; and one 
day, as I crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh 
spray blowing in my face, I came upon the 
mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone, and 
hardly more than the impression of its flat 
bottom left amid the rushes; yet its model was 
sharply defined, as if it were a large decayed 
pad, with its veins. It was as impressive a 
wreck as one could imagine on the sea-shore, 
and had as good a moral. It is by this time 
mere vegetable mould and undistinguishable 
pond shore, through which rushes and flags 
have pushed up. I used to admire the ripple 
marks on the sandy bottom, at the north end 
of this pond, made firm and hard to the feet of 
the wader by the pressure of the water, and the 
rushes which grew in Indian file, in waving 
lines, corresponding to these marks, rank be- 
hind rank, as if the waves had planted them. 
There also I have found, in considerable quan- 
tities, curious balls, composed apparently of 
fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, from 
half an inch to four inches in diameter, and per- 
fectly spherical. These wash back and forth in 
shallow water on a sandy bottom, and are 
sometimes cast on the shore. They are either 
solid grass, or have a little sand in the middle. 
At first you would say that they were formed by 



S60 WALDEN 

the action of the waves, like a pebble; yet the 
smallest are made of equally coarse materials, 
half an inch long, and they are produced only 
at one season of the year. Moreover, the waves, 
I suspect, do not so much construct as wear 
down a material which has already acquired 
consistency. They preserve their form when 
dry for an indefinite period. 

Flinfs Pond! Such is the poverty of our 
nomenclature. What right had the unclean and 
stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky 
water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, 
to give his name to it.P Some skin-flint, who 
loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, 
or a bright cent, in which he could see his own 
brazen face ; who regarded even the wild ducks 
which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers 
grown into crooked and horny talons from the 
long habit of grasping harpy-like ; — so it is 
not named for me. I go not there to see him 
nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who 
never bathed in it, who never loved it, who 
never protected it, who never spoke a good 
word for it, nor thanked God that He had 
made it. Rather let it be named from the fishes 
that swim in it, the wild fowl or quadrupeds 
which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow 
by its shores, or some wild man or child the 
thread of whose history is interwoven with its 
own; not from him who could show no title 



THE PONDS 261 

to it but the deed which a Uke-minded neighbor 
or legislature gave him, — him who thought 
only of its money value; whose presence per- 
chance cursed all the shore; who exhausted the 
land around it, and would fain have exhausted 
the waters within it; who regretted only that 
it was not English hay or cranberry meadow, — 
there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his 
eyes, — and would have drained and sold it for 
the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, 
and it was no privilege to him to behold it. I 
respect not his labors, his farm where every- 
thing has its price; who would carry the land- 
scape, who would carry his God to market if 
he could get anything for Him; who goes to 
market for his god as it is; on whose farm 
nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, 
whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no 
fruits, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of 
his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till 
they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty 
that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are respect- 
able and interesting to me in proportion as they 
are poor, — poor farmers. A model farm ! 
where the house stands like a fungus in a muck- 
heap, chambers for men, horses, oxen, and 
swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all contiguous 
to one another ! Stocked with men ! A great 
grease-spot, redolent of manures and butter- 
milk ! Under a high state of cultivation, being 



262 WALDEN 

manured with the hearts and brains of men ! 
As if you were to raise your potatoes in the 
churchyard ! Such is a model farm. 

No, no; if the fairest features of the land- 
scape are to be named after men, let them be 
the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our 
lakes receive as true names at least as the 
Icarian Sea, where "still the shore" a '* brave 
attempt resounds." 

Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way 
to Flint's; Fair-Haven, an expansion of Con- 
cord River, said to contain some seventy acres, 
is a mile southwest; and White Pond, of about 
forty acres, is a mile and a half beyond Fair- 
Haven. This is my lake country. These, with 
Concord River, are my water privileges; and 
night and day, year in and year out, they grind 
such grist as I carry to them. 

Since the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and 
I myself have profaned Walden, perhaps the 
most attractive, if not the most beautiful, of all 
our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond ; 
— a poor name from its commonness, whether 
derived from the remarkable purity of its waters 
or the color of its sands. In these as in other 
respects, however, it is a lesser twin of Walden. 
They are so much alike that you would say they 
must be connected under ground. It has the 
same stony shore, and its waters are of the same 



THE PONDS 263 

hue. As at Walden, in sultry dog-day weather, 
looking down through the woods on some of its 
bays which are not so deep but that the reflec- 
tion from the bottom tinges them, its waters are 
of a misty bluish green or glaucous color. Many 
years since I used to go there to collect the sand 
by cart-loads, to make sand-paper with, and I 
have continued to visit it ever since. One who 
frequents it proposes to call it Virid Lake. Per- 
haps it might be called Yellow-Pine Lake, from 
the following circumstance. About fifteen years 
ago you could see the top of a pitch-pine of the 
kind called yellow-pine hereabouts, though it is 
not a distinct species, projecting above the sur- 
face in deep water, many rods from the shore. 
It was even" supposed by some that the pond 
had sunk, and this was one of the primitive 
forest that formerly stood there. I find that 
even so long ago as 1792, in a ** Topographical 
Description of the Town of Concord," by one 
of its citizens, in the Collections of the Massa- 
chusetts Historical Society, the author, after 
speaking of Walden and White Ponds, adds: 
'*In the middle of the latter may be seen, when 
the water is very low, a tree which appears as 
if it grew in the place where it now stands, 
although the roots are fifty feet below the sur- 
face of the water; the top of this tree is broken 
off, and at that place measures fourteen inches 
in diameter." In the spring of '49 I talked with 



264 WALDEN 

the man who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, 
who told me that it was he who got out this tree 
ten or fifteen years before. As near as he could 
remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from 
the shore, where the water was thirty or forty 
feet deep. It was in the winter, and he had 
been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had 
resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of 
his neighbors, he would take out the old yellow 
pine. He sawed a channel in the ice toward the 
shore, and hauled it over and along and out on 
to the ice with oxen; but, before he had gone 
far in his work, he was surprised to find that it 
was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the 
branches pointing down, and the small end firmly 
fastened in the sandy bottom. It was about a 
foot in diameter at the big end, and he had ex- 
pected to get a good saw-log, but it was so rotten 
as to be fit only for fuel, if for that. He had 
some of it in his shed then. There were marks 
of an axe and of woodpeckers on the but. He 
thought that it might have been a dead tree on 
the shore, but was finally blown over into the 
pond, and after the top had become water- 
logged, while the but-end was still dry and 
light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end 
up. His father, eighty years old, could not 
remember when it was not there. Several pretty 
large logs may still be seen lying on the bot- 
tom, where, owing to the undulation of the 



THE PONDS 263 

surface, they look like huge water snakes in 
motion. 

This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, 
for there is little in it to tempt a fisherman. 
Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or 
the common sweet flag, the blue flag (Iris 
versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water, ris- 
ing from the stony bottom all around the shore, 
where it is visited by humming birds in June, 
and the color both of its bluish blades and its 
flowers, and especially their reflections, are in 
singular harmony with the glaucous water. 

White Pond and Walden are great crystals 
on the surface of the earth. Lakes of Light. If 
they were permanently congealed, and small 
enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, 
be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to 
adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, 
and ample, and secured to us and our succes' 
sors forever, we disregard them, and run after 
the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure 
to have a market value; they contain no muck. 
How much more beautiful than our lives, how 
much more transparent than our characters, 
are they ! We never learned meanness of them. 
How much fairer than the pool before the farm- 
er's door, in which his ducks swim ! Hither the 
clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human 
inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds 
with their plumage and their notes are in har- 



266 WALDEN 

mony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden 
conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of 
Nature ? She flourishes most alone, far from 
the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven ! 
ye disgrace earth. 



X 

BAKER FARM 

SOMETIMES I rambled to pine groves, 
standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, 
full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling 
with light, so soft and green and shady that the 
Druids would have forsaken their oaks to wor- 
ship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond 
Flint's Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary 
blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to 
stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper 
covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or 
to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in fes- 
toons from the white-spruce trees, and toad- 
stools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the 
ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the 
stumps,like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles ; 
where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red 
alder-berry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork 
grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its 
folds, and the wild-holly berries make the be- 
holder forget his home with their beauty, and he 
is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild 
forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste. In- 



268 WALDEN 

stead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a 
visit to particular trees, of kinds which are rare 
in this neighborhood, standing far away in the 
middle of some pasture, or in the depths of a 
wood or swamp, or on a hill top: such as the 
black-birch, of which we have some handsome 
specimens two feet in diameter; its cousin the 
yellow-birch, with its loose golden vest, per- 
fumed like the first ; the beech, which has so neat 
a bole and beautifully lichen-painted, perfect in 
all its details, of which, excepting scattered speci- 
mens, I know but one small grove of sizable trees 
left in the township, supposed by some to have 
been planted by the pigeons that were once 
baited with beech nuts near by; it is worth the 
while to see the silver grain sparkle when you 
split this wood; the bass; the hornbeam; the 
celtis occidentalism or false elm, of which we have 
but one well-grown ; some taller mast of a pine, 
a shingle tree, or a more perfect hemlock than 
usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of 
the woods; and many others I could mention. 
These were the shrines I visited both summer 
and winter. 

Once it chanced that I stood in the very abut- 
ment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower 
stratum of the atmosphere, tingeing the grass and 
leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked 
through colored crystal. It was a lake of rain- 
bow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like 




Si 



ti 






BAKER FARM 269 

a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it might have 
tinged my employments and life. As I walked 
on the railroad causeway, I used to wonder at 
the halo of light around my shadow, and would 
fain fancy myself one of the elect. One who 
visited me declared that the shadows of some 
Irishmen before him had no halo about them, 
that it was only natives that were so distinguished. 
Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his memoirs, that, 
after a certain terrible dream or vision which he 
had during his confinement in the castle of St. 
Angelo, a resplendent light appeared over the 
shadow of his head at morning and evening, 
whether he was in Italy or France, and it was par- 
ticularly conspicuous when the grass was moist 
with dew. This was probably the same phenom- 
enon to which I have referred, which is especially 
observed in the morning, but also at other times, 
and even by moonlight. Though a constant one, 
it is not commonly noticed, and, in the case of 
an excitable imagination like Cellini's, it would 
be basis enough for superstition. Besides, he 
tells us that he showed it to very few. But are 
they not indeed distinguished who are conscious 
that they are regarded at all.^ 

I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair- 
Haven, through the woods, to eke out my scanty 
fare of vegetables. My way led through Pleasant 
Meadow, an adjunct of the Baker Farm, that 



270 WALDEN 

retreat of which a poet has since sung, begin- 
ning, — 

"Thy entry is a pleasant field, 
Which some mossy fruit trees yield 
Partly to a ruddy brook, 
By gliding musquash undertook, 
And mercurial trout. 
Darting about." 

I thought of living there before I went to Walden. 
I "hooked" the apples, leaped the brook, and 
scared the musquash and the trout. It was one 
of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long 
before one, in which many events may happen, a 
large portion of our natural life, though it was 
already half spent when I started. By the way 
there came up a shower, which compelled me 
to stand half an hour under a pine, piling 
boughs over my head, and wearing my hand- 
kerchief for a shed; and when at length I had 
made one cast over the pickerel-weed, standing 
up to my middle in water, I found myself sud- 
denly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder 
began to rumble with such emphasis that I 
could do no more than listen to it. The gods 
must be proud, thought I, with such forked 
flashes to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. So 
I made haste for shelter to the nearest hut, which 
stood half a mile from any road, but so much the 
nearer to the pond, and had long been unin- 
habited : — 



BAKER FARM 271 

**And here a poet builded. 
In the completed years. 
For behold a trivial cabin 
That to destruction steers." 

So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, 
dwelt now John Field, an Irishman, and his 
wife, and several children, from the broad- 
faced boy who assisted his father at his work, 
and now came running by his side from the bog 
to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like, 
cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's 
knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out 
from its home in the midst of wet and hunger in- 
quisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege 
of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a 
noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the 
world, instead of John Field's poor starveling 
brat. There we sat together under that part of 
the roof which leaked the least, while it showered 
and thundered without. I had sat there many 
times of old before the ship was built that 
floated this family to America. An honest, hard- 
working, but shiftless man plainly was John 
Field; and his wife, she too was brave to cook 
so many successive dinners in the recesses of 
that lofty stove ; with round greasy face and bare 
breast, still thinking to improve her condition 
one day ; with the never absent mop in one hand, 
and yet no effects of it visible anywhere. The 
chickens, which had also taken shelter here from 



272 WALDEN 

the rain, stalked about the room like members of 
the family, too humanized methought to roast 
well. They stood and looked in my eye or pecked 
at my shoe significantly. Meanwhile my host 
told me his story, how hard he worked *' bog- 
ging" for a neighboring farmer, turning up a 
meadow with a spade or bog hoe at the rate of 
ten dollars an acre and the use of the land with 
manure for one year, and his little broad-faced 
son worked cheerfully at his father's side the 
while, not knowing how poor a bargain the 
latter had made. I tried to help him with my 
experience, telling him that he was one of my 
nearest neighbors, and that I too, who came 
a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was 
getting my living like himself; that I lived in a 
tight, light, and clean house, which hardly cost 
more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his 
commonly amounts to ; and how, if he chose, he 
might in a month or two build himself a palace 
of his own ; that I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor 
butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not 
have to work to get them; again, as I did not 
work hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it 
cost me but a trifle for my food : but as he began 
with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and 
beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and 
when he had worked hard he had to eat hard 
again to repair the waste of his system, — and 
so it was as broad as it was long, indeed it was 




=5 






BAKER FARM 273 

broader than it was long, for he was discon- 
tented and wasted his life into the bargain ; and 
yet he had rated it as a gain, in coming to Amer- 
ica, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and 
meat every day. But the only true America is 
that country where you are at liberty to pursue 
such a mode of life as may enable you to do with- 
out these, and where the state does not endeavor 
to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and 
other superfluous expenses which directly or in- 
directly result from the use of such things. For 
I purposely talked to him as if he were a philoso- 
pher, or desired to be one. I should be glad if all 
the meadows on the earth were left in a wild 
state, if that were the consequence of men's be- 
ginning to redeem themselves. A man will not 
need to study history to find out what is best for 
his own culture. But alas ! the culture of an 
Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with 
a sort of moral bog hoe. I told him, that as he 
worked so hard at bogging, he required thick 
boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon 
soiled and worn out, but I wore light shoes and 
thin clothing, which cost not half so much, 
though he might think that I was dressed like a 
gentleman (which, however, was not the case), 
and in an hour or two, without labor, but as a 
recreation, I could, if I wished, catch as many 
fish as I should want for two days, or earn 
enough money to support me a week. If he and 



274 WALDEN 

his family would live simply, they might all go 
a-huckleberrying in the summer for their amuse- 
ment. John heaved a sigh at this, and his wife 
stared with arms akimbo, and both appeared to 
be wondering if they had capital enough to begin 
such a course with, or arithmetic enough to 
carry it through. It was sailing by dead reck- 
oning to them, and they saw not clearly how to 
make their port so ; therefore I suppose they still 
take life bravely, after their fashion, face to face, 
giving it tooth and nail, not having skill to split its 
massive columns with any fine entering wedge, 
and rout it in detail ; — thinking to deal with it 
roughly, as one should handle a thistle. But 
they fight at an overwhelming disadvantage, — 
living, John Field, alas ! without arithmetic, 
and failing so. 

"Do you ever fish.^" I asked. "Oh, yes, I 
catch a mess now and then when I am lying by; 
good perch I catch." "What 's your bait .?" "I 
catch shiners with fish- worms, and bait the perch 
with them." "You 'd better go now, John," 
said his wife, with glistening and hopeful face; 
but John demurred. 

The shower was now over, and a rainbow 
above the eastern woods promised a fair even- 
ing; so I took my departure. When I had got 
without I asked for a dish, hoping to get a sight 
of the well bottom, to complete my survey of 
the premises ; but there, alas ! are shallows and 



BAKER FARM 275 

quicksands, and rope broken withal, and bucket 
irrecoverable. Meanwhile the right culinary 
vessel was selected, water was seemingly dis- 
tilled, and after consultation and long delay 
passed out to the thirsty one, — not yet suffered 
to cool, not yet to settle. Such gruel sustains 
life here, I thought; so, shutting my eyes, and 
excluding the motes by a skilfully directed under- 
current, I drank to genuine hospitality the 
heartiest draught I could. I am not squeamish 
in such cases when manners are concerned. 

As I was leaving the Irishman's roof after the 
rain, bending my steps again to the pond, my 
haste to catch pickerel, wading in retired mead- 
ows, in sloughs and bog-holes, in forlorn and 
savage places, appeared for an instant trivial to 
me who had been sent to school and college; 
but as I ran down the hill toward the reddenino; 
west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and 
some faint tinkling sounds borne to my ear 
through the cleansed air, from I know not what 
quarter, my Good Genius seemed to say, — Go 
fish and hunt far and wide day by day, — far- 
ther and wider, — and rest thee by many brooks 
and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember 
thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free 
from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. 
Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the 
night overtake thee everywhere at home. There 
are no larger fields than these, no worthier games 



276 WALDEN 

than may here be played. Grow wild according 
to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, 
which will never become English hay. Let the 
thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to 
farmers' crops .^ that is not its errand to thee. 
Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to 
carts and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy 
trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it 
not. Through want of enterprise and faith men 
are where they are, buying and selling, and 
spending their lives like serfs. 
O Baker Farm ! 

"Landscape where the richest element 
Is a little sunshine innocent." . . . 

*'No one runs to revel 
On thy rail-fenced lea." . . . 

"Debate with no man hast thou, 

With questions art never perplexed. 
As tame at the first sight as now, 

In thy plain russet gabardine dressed." . . . 

"Come ye who love. 

And ye who hate. 
Children of the Holy Dove, 

And Guy Faux of the state. 
And hang conspiracies 
From the tough rafters of the trees ! " 

Men come tamely home at night only from the 
next field or street, where their household echoes 
haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its 







Fair- Haven Pond 



BAKER FARM 277 

own breath over again ; their shadows morning 
and evening reach farther than their daily steps. 
We should come home from far, from adventures, 
and perils, and discoveries every day, with new 
experience and character. 

Before I had reached the pond some fresh 
impulse had brought out John Field, with al- 
tered mind, letting go ** bogging" ere this sunset. 
But he, poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins 
while I was catching a fair string, and he said it 
was his luck ; but when he changed seats in the 
boat luck changed seats too. Poor John Field ! 
— I trust he does not read this, unless he will 
improve by it, — thinking to live by some de- 
rivative old country mode in this primitive new 
country, — to catch perch with shiners. It is 
good bait sometimes, I allow. With his horizon 
all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, 
with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his 
Adam's grandmother and boggy ways, not to 
rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their 
wading, webbed, bog-trotting feet get talaria to 
their heels. 



XI 

HIGHER LAWS 

AS I came home through the woods with my 
string of fish, traiUng my pole, it being 
now quite dark, I caught a ghmpse of a 
woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a 
strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly 
tempted to seize and devour him raw ; not that I 
was hungry then, except for that wildness which 
he represented. Once or twice, however, while 
I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the 
woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange 
abandonment, seeking some kind of venison 
which I might devour, and no morsel could have 
been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had 
become unaccountably familiar. I found in my- 
self, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, 
as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, 
and another toward a primitive rank and savage 
one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild 
not less than the good. The wildness and ad- 
venture that are in fishing still recommended it 
to me. I like sometimes to take rank hold on life 
and spend my day more as the animals do. 



HIGHER LAWS 279 

Perhaps I have owed to this employment and to 
hunting, when quite young, my closest acquaint- 
ance with Nature. They early introduce us to 
and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, 
at that age, we should have little acquaintance. 
Fishermen, hunters, wood-choppers, and others, 
spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a 
peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are 
often in a more favorable mood for observing 
her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than phil- 
osophers or poets even, who approach her with 
expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself 
to them. The traveller on the prairie is naturally 
a hunter, on the head waters of the Missouri and 
Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. 
Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller 
learns things at second-hand and by the halves, 
and is poor authority. We are most interested 
when science reports what those men already 
know practically or instinctively, for that alone 
is a true humanity^ or account of human expe- 
rience. 

They mistake who assert that the Yankee 
has few amusements, because he has not so 
many public holidays, and men and boys do not 
play so many games as they do in England, for 
here the more primitive but solitary amuse- 
ments of hunting, fishing, and the like have not 
yet given place to the former. Almost every 
New England boy among my contemporaries 



280 WALDEN 

shouldered a fowling-piece between the ages of 
ten and fourteen; and his hunting and fishing 
grounds were not Hmited Hke the preserves of 
an English nobleman, but were more boundless 
even than those of a savage. No wonder, then, 
that he did not oftener stay to play on the com- 
mon. But already a change is taking place, 
owing, not to an increased humanity, but to an 
increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the 
hunter is the greatest friend of the animals 
hunted, not excepting the Humane Society. 

Moreover, when at the pond, I wished some- 
times to add fish to my fare for variety. I have 
actually fished from the same kind of necessity 
that the first fishers did. Whatever humanity I 
might conjure up against it was all factitious, 
and concerned my philosophy more than my 
feelings. I speak of fishing only now, for I had 
long felt differently about fowling, and sold my 
gun before I went to the woods. Not that I am 
less humane than others, but I did not perceive 
that my feelings were much affected. I did not 
pity the fishes nor the worms. This was habit. 
As for fowling, during the last years that I car- 
ried a gun my excuse was that I was studying 
ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. 
But I confess that I am now inclined to think 
that there is a finer way of studying ornithology 
than this. It requires so much closer attention 
to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason 



HIGHER LAWS 281 

only, I have been willing to omit the gun. Yet 
notwithstanding the objection on the score of 
. humanity, I am compelled to doubt if equally 
valuable sports are ever substituted for these; 
and when some of my friends have asked me 
anxiously about their boys, whether they should 
let them hunt, I have answered, yes, — remem- 
bering that it was one of the best parts of my 
education, — make them hunters, though sports- 
men only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at 
last, so that they shall not find game large 
enough for them in this or any vegetable wilder- 
ness, — hunters as well as fishers of men. Thus 
far I am of the opinion of Chaucer's nun, who 

"yave not of the text a pulled hen 
That saith that hunters ben not holy men." 

There is a period in the history of the individual, 
as of the race, when the hunters are the **best 
men," as the Algonquins called them. We can- 
not but pity the boy w ho has never fired a gun ; 
he is no more humane, while his education has 
been sadly neglected. This was my answer with 
respect to those youths who were bent on this 
pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow 
it. No humane being, past the thoughtless age 
of boyhood, will w^antonly murder any creature 
which holds its life by the same tenure that he 
does. The hare in its extremity cries like a 
child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies 



282 WALDEN 

do not always make the usual philanthropic 
distinctions. 

Such is oftenest the young man's introduction 
to the forest, and the most original part of him- 
self. He goes thither at first as a hunter and 
fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better 
life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, 
as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the 
gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are 
still and always young in this respect. In some 
countries a hunting parson is no uncommon 
sight. Such a one might make a good shep- 
herd's dog, but is far from being the Good Shep- 
herd. I have been surprised to consider that 
the only obvious employment, except wood- 
chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which 
ever to my knowledge detained at Walden Pond 
for a whole half day any of my fellow-citizens, 
whether fathers or children of the town, with 
just one exception, was fishing. Commonly 
they did not think that they were lucky, or well 
paid for their time, unless they got a long string 
of fish, though they had the opportunity of see- 
ing the pond all the while. They might go 
there a thousand times before the sediment of 
fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their 
purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying 
process would be going on all the while. The 
governor and his council faintly remember the 
pond, for they went a-fishing there when they 



HIGHER LAWS 283 

were boys; but now they are too old and dig- 
nified to go a-fisliing, and so they know it no 
more forever. Yet even they expect to go to 
heaven at last. If the legislature regards it, 
it is chiefly to regulate the number of hooks to 
be used there; but they know nothing about 
the hook of hooks with which to angle for the 
pond itself, empaling the legislature for a bait. 
Thus, even in civilized communities, the em- 
bryo man passes through the hunter stage of 
development. 

I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I 
cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. 
I have tried it again and again. I have skill at 
it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain in- 
stinct for it, which revives from time to time; 
but always when I have done I feel that it would 
have been better if I had not fished. I think 
that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, 
yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is 
unquestionably this instinct in me which be- 
longs to the lower orders of creation; yet with 
every year I am less a fisherman, though with- 
out more humanity or even wisdom; at present 
I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I were 
to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted 
to become a fisher and hunter in earnest. Be- 
sides, there is something essentially unclean 
about this diet, and all flesh, and I began to see 
where housework commences, and whence the 



284 WALDEN 

endeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy 
and respectable appearance, each day, to keep 
the house sweet and free from all ill odors and 
sights. Having been my own butcher and scul- 
lion and cook, as well as the gentleman for whom 
the dishes were served up, I can speak from an 
unusually complete experience. The practical 
objection to animal food in my case was its un- 
cleanness; and, besides, when I had caught 
and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they 
seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was 
insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more 
than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes 
would have done as well, with less trouble and 
filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I had 
rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, 
or coffee, &c. ; not so much because of any ill 
effects which I had traced to them, as because 
they were not agreeable to my imagination. The 
repugnance to animal food is not the effect of 
experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more 
beautiful to live low and fare hard in many re- 
spects; and though I never did so, I went far 
enough to please my imagination. I believe 
that every man who has ever been earnest to 
preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best 
condition has been particularly inclined to ab- 
stain from animal food, and from much food of 
any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by en- 
tomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that 



HIGHER LAWS 285 

''some insects in their perfect state, though 
furnished with organs of feeding, make no use 
of them;" and they lay it down as ''a general 
rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much 
less than in that of larvae. The voracious cater- 
pillar when transformed into a butterfly," . . . 
''and the gluttonous maggot when become a 
fly," content themselves with a drop or two of 
honey or some other sweet Uquid. The abdo- 
men under the wings of the butterfly still repre- 
sents the larva. This is the tidbit which tempts 
his insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a 
man in the larva state; and there are whole 
nations in that condition, nations without fancy 
or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray 

them. 

It is hard to provide and cook so simple and 
clean a diet as will not offend the imagination ; 
but this, I think, is to be fed when we feed the 
body; they should both sit down at the same 
table. Yet perhaps this may be done. The 
fruits eaten temperately need not make us 
ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the 
worthiest pursuits. But put an extra condi- 
ment into your dish, and it will poison you. It 
is not worth the while to live by rich cookery. 
Most men would feel shame if caught preparing 
with their own hands precisely such a dinner, 
whether of animal or vegetable food, as is every 
day prepared for them by others. Yet till this 



286 WALDEN 

is otherwise we are not civilized, and, if gentle- 
men and ladies, are not true men and women. 
This certainly suggests what change is to be 
made. It may be vain to ask why the imagina- 
tion will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. I 
am satisfied that it is not. Is it not a reproach 
that man is a carnivorous animal ? True, he 
can and does live, in a great measure, by prey- 
ing on other animals; but this is a miserable 
way, — as any one who will go to snaring rab- 
bits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn, — and 
he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race 
who shall teach man to confine himself to a 
more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever 
my own practice may be, I have no doubt that 
it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in 
its gradual improvement, to leave off eating ani- 
mals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off 
eating each other when they came in contact 
with the more civilized. 

If one listens to the faintest but constant sug- 
gestions of his genius, which are certainly true, 
he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, 
it may lead him ; and yet that way, as he grows 
more resolute and faithful, his road lies. The 
faintest assured objection which one healthy 
man feels will at length prevail over the argu- 
ments and customs of mankind. No man ever 
followed his genius till it misled him. Though 
the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no 



HIGHER LAWS 287 

one can say that the consequences were to be re- 
gretted, for these were a Hfe in conformity to 
higher principles. If the day and the night are 
such that you greet them with joy, and life emits 
a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented 
herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more im- 
mortal, — that is your success. All nature is 
your congratulation, and you have cause mo- 
mentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains 
and values are farthest from being appreciated. 
We easily come to doubt if they exist. We 
soon forget them. They are the highest reality. 
Perhaps the facts most astounding and most 
real are never communicated by man to man. 
The true harvest of my daily life is some- 
what as intangible and indescribable as the 
tints of morning or evening. It is a little star- 
dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I 
have clutched. 

Yet, for my part, I was never unusually 
squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat 
with a good relish, if it were necessary. I am 
glad to have drunk water so long, for the same 
reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium- 
eater's heaven. I would fain keep sober always ; 
and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. 
I believe that water is the only drink for a wise 
man ; wine is not so noble a liquor ; and think 
of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup 
of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of 



288 WALDEN 

tea ! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by 
them ! Even music may be intoxicating. Such 
apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and 
Rome, and will destroy England and America. 
Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be in- 
toxicated by the air he breathes ? I have found 
it to be the most serious objection to coarse 
labors long continued, that they compelled me 
to eat and drink coarsely also. But to tell the 
truth, I find myself at present somewhat less 
particular in these respects. I carry less religion 
to the table, ask no blessing; not because I am 
wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to confess, 
because, however much it is to be regretted, 
with years I have grown more coarse and in- 
different. Perhaps these questions are enter- 
tained only in youth, as most believe of poetry. 
My practice is ** nowhere," my opinion is here. 
Nevertheless I am far from regarding myself as 
one of those privileged ones to whom the Ved 
refers when it says that *'he who has true faith 
in the Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all 
that exists," that is, is not bound to inquire what 
is his food, or who prepares it ; and even in their 
case it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commen- 
tator has remarked, that the Vedant limits this 
privilege to *'the time of distress." 

Who has not sometimes derived an inexpress- 
ible satisfaction from his food in which appetite 
had no share ? I have been thrilled to think 



HIGHER LAWS 289 

that I owed a mental perception to the com- 
monly gross sense of taste, that I have been in- 
spired through the palate, that some berries 
which I had eaten on a hillside had fed my 
genius. *'The soul not being mistress of her- 
self," says Thseng-tseu, "one looks, and one 
does not see ; one listens, and one does not hear ; 
one eats, and one does not know the savor of 
food." He who distinguishes the true savor of 
his food can never be a glutton ; he who does not 
cannot be otherwise. A puritan may go to his 
brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as 
ever an alderman to his turtle. Not that food 
which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, 
but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is 
neither the quality nor the quantity, but the de- 
votion to sensual savors; when that which is 
eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or in- 
spire our spiritual life, but food for the worms 
that possess us. If the hunter has a taste for 
mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such savage 
tidbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly 
made of a calf's foot, or for sardines from over 
the sea, and they are even. He goes to the mill- 
pond, she to her preserve-pot. The wonder is 
how they, how you and I, can live this slimy 
beastly life, eating and drinking. 

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is 
never an instant's truce between virtue and 
vice. Goodness is the only investment that never 

10 



290 WALDEN 

fails. In the music of the harp which trembles 
round the world it is the insisting on this which 
thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer 
for the Universe's Insurance Company, recom- 
mending its laws, and our little goodness is all 
the assessment that we pay. Though the youth 
at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe 
are not indifferent, but are forever on the side 
of the most sensitive. Listen to every zephyr 
for some reproof, for it is surely there, and 
he is unfortunate who does not hear it. We 
cannot touch a string or move a stop but the 
charming moral transfixes us. Many an irk- 
some noise, go a long way off, is heard as 
music, a proud sweet satire on the meanness 
of our lives. 

We are conscious of an animal in us, which 
awakens in proportion as our higher nature 
slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps 
cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms 
which, even in life and health, occupy our bod- 
ies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but 
never change its nature. I fear that it may en- 
joy a certain health of its own ; that we may be 
well, yet not pure. The other day I picked up 
the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound 
teeth and tusks, which suggested that there 
was an animal health and vigor distinct from 
the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other 
means than temperance and purity. '*That in 



HIGHER LAWS 291 

which men differ from brute beasts," says Men- 
cius, *'is a thing very inconsiderable ; the com- 
mon herd lose it very soon; superior men 
preserve it carefully." Who knows what sort of 
life would result if we had attained to purity ? 
If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity 
I would go to seek him forthwith. "A command 
over our passions, and over the external senses 
of the body, and good acts, are declared by the 
Ved to be indispensable in the mind's approxi- 
mation to God." Yet the spirit can for the time 
pervade and control every member and function 
of the body, and transmute what in form is the 
grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. 
The generative energy, which, when we are loose, 
dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are 
continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity 
is the flowering of man; and what are called 
Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are 
but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows 
at once to God when the channel of purity is 
open. By turns our purity inspires and our im- 
purity casts us down. He is blessed who is as- 
sured that the animal is dying out in him day 
by day, and the divine being established. Per- 
haps there is none but has cause for shame on 
account of the inferior and brutish nature to 
which he is allied. I fear that we are such gods 
or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine 
allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and 



292 WALDEN 

that, to some extent, our very life is our dis- 
grace. — 

*'How happy 's he who hath due place assigned 
To his beasts and disaforested his mind ! 



Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast. 

And is not ass himself to all the rest ! 

Else man not only is the herd of swine. 

But he's those devils too which did incline 

Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse.'* 

All sensuality is one, though it takes many 
forms ; all purity is one. It is the same whether 
a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensu- 
ally. They are but one appetite, and we only 
need to see a person do any one of these things 
to know how great a sensualist he is. The 
impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. 
When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of 
his burrow, he shows himself at another. If 
you would be chaste, you must be temperate. 
What is chastity ? How shall a man know if he 
is chaste.^ He shall not know it. We have 
heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. 
We speak conformably to the rumor which we 
have heard. From exertion come wisdom and 
purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. 
In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of 
mind. An unclean person is universally a sloth- 
ful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun 
shines on prostrate, who reposes without being 



HIGHER LAWS 293 

fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness and 
all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at clean- 
ing a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, 
but she must be overcome. What avails it that 
you are Christian, if you are not purer than the 
heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you 
are not more religious ? I know of many systems 
of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts 
fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to 
new endeavors, though it be to the performance 
of rites merely. 

I hesitate to say these things, but it is not 
because of the subject, — I care not how obscene 
my words are, — but because I cannot speak 
of them without betraying my impurity. We 
discourse freely without shame of one form of 
sensuality, and are silent about another. We 
are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of 
the necessary functions of human nature. In 
earlier ages, in some countries, every function 
was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. 
Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo law- 
giver, however offensive it may be to modern 
taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, 
void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating 
what is mean, and does not falsely excuse him- 
self by calling these things trifles. 

Every man is the builder of a temple, called 
his body, to the god he worships, after a style 
purely his own, nor can he get oflE by hammering 



294 WALDEN 

marble instead. We are all sculptors and paint- 
ers, and our material is our own flesh and blood 
and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to 
refine a man's features, any meanness or sensu- 
ality to imbrute them. 

John Farmer sat at his door one September 
evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still 
running on his labor more or less. Having 
bathed he sat down to recreate his intellectual 
man. It was a rather cool evening, and some 
of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He 
had not attended to the train of his thoughts 
long when he heard some one playing on a flute, 
and that sound harmonized with his mood. 
Still he thought of his work; but the burden of 
his thought was that though this kept running 
in his head, and he found himself planning and 
contriving it against his will, yet it concerned 
him very little. It was no more than the scurf 
of his skin, which was constantly shufiled off. 
But the notes of the flute came home to his ears 
out of a different sphere from that he worked in, 
and suggested work for certain faculties which 
slumbered in him. They gently did away with 
the street, and the village, and the state in which 
he lived. A voice said to him, — Why do you 
stay here and live this mean moiling life, when 
a glorious existence is possible for you ? Those 
same stars twinkle over other fields than 
these. — But how to come out of this condi- 



HIGHER LAWS 295 

tion and actually migrate thither? All that he 
could think of was to practise some new auster- 
ity, to let his mind descend into his body and 
redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing 
respect. 



XII 

BRUTE NEIGHBORS 

SOMETIMES I had a companion in my 
fishing, who came through the village to 
my house from the other side of the town, 
and the catching of the dinner was as much a 
social exercise as the eating of it. 

Hermit. I wonder what the world is doing 
now. I have not heard so much as a locust over 
the sweet-fern these three hours. The pigeons 
are all asleep upon their roosts, — no flutter 
from them. Was that a farmer's noon horn 
which sounded from beyond the woods just now ? 
The hands are coming in to boiled salt beef and 
cider and Indian bread. Why will men worry 
themselves so ? He that does not eat need not 
work. I wonder how much they have reaped. 
Who would live there where a body can never 
think for the barking of Bose ? And oh, the 
housekeeping ! to keep bright the devil's door- 
knobs, and scour his tubs this bright day ! 
Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow 
tree; and then for morning calls and dinner- 
parties ! Only a wood-pecker tapping. Oh, 
they swarm; the sun is too warm there: they 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS 297 

are born too far into life for me. I have water 
from the spring, and a loaf of brown bread on 
the shelf. — Hark ! I hear a rustling of the 
leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding 
to the instinct of the chase .^^ or the lost pig 
which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks 
I saw after the rain ? It comes on apace ; my 
sumachs and sweet-briers tremble. — Eh, Mr. 
Poet, is it you ? How do you like the world to- 
day.? 

Poet, See those clouds ; how they hang ! 
That's the greatest thing I have seen to-day. 
There's nothing like it in old paintings, nothing 
like it in foreign lands, — unless when we were 
off the coast of Spain. That's a true Mediter- 
ranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to 
get, and have not eaten to-day, that I might go 
a-fishing. That's the true industry for poets. 
It is the only trade I have learned. Come, 
let's along. 

Hermit. I cannot resist. My brown bread 
will soon be gone. I will go with you gladly soon, 
but I am just concluding a serious meditation. 
I think that I am near the end of it. Leave me 
alone, then, for a while. But that we may not 
be delayed, you shall be digging the bait mean- 
while. Angle- worms are rarely to be met with 
in these parts, where the soil was never fattened 
with manure; the race is nearly extinct. The 
sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that 



298 WALDEN 

of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not 
too keen ; and this you may have all to yourself 
to-day. I would advise you to set in the spade 
down yonder among the ground-nuts, where 
you see the johnswort waving. I think that I 
may warrant you one worm to every three sods 
you turn up, if you look well in among the roots 
of the grass, as if you were weeding. Or, if 
you choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, 
for I have found the increase of fair bait to be 
very nearly as the squares of the distances. 

Hermit alone. Let me see, where was I ? 
Methinks I was nearly in this frame of mind; 
the world lay about at this angle. Shall I go to 
heaven or a-fishing ? If I should soon bring 
this meditation to an end, would another so 
sweet occasion be likely to offer ? I was as near 
being resolved into the essence of things as ever I 
was in my life. I fear my thoughts will not come 
back to me. If it would do any good, I would 
whistle for them. When they make us an offer, 
is it wise to say. We will think of it ? My thoughts 
have left no track, and I cannot find the path 
again. What was it that I was thinking oi? 
It was a very hazy day. I will just try these 
three sentences of Con-fut-see; they may fetch 
that state about again. I know not whether it 
was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. Mem. 
There never is but one opportunity of a kind. 

Poet, How now. Hermit, is it too soon ? I 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS 299 

have got just thirteen whole ones, besides several 
which are imperfect or undersized; but they 
will do for the smaller fry; they do not cover 
up the hook so much. Those village worms are 
quite too large ; a shiner may make a meal off 
one without finding the skewer. 

Hermit. Well, then, let's be off. Shall we 
to the Concord ? There 's good sport there if 
the water be not too high. 

Why do precisely these objects which we be- 
hold make a world ? Why has man just these 
species of animals for his neighbors ; as if noth- 
ing but a mouse could have filled this crevice ? 
I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals 
to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, 
in a sense, made to carry some portion of our 
thoughts. 

The mice which haunted my house were not 
the common ones, which are said to have been 
introduced into the country, but a wild native 
kind not found in the village. I sent one to a 
distinguished naturalist, and it interested him 
much. When I was building, one of these had its 
nest underneath the house, and before I had 
laid the second floor, and swept out the shavings, 
would come out regularly at lunch time and pick 
up the crumbs at my feet. It probably had 
never seen a man before; and it soon became 
quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and 



300 WALDEN 

up my clothes. It could readily ascend the 
sides of the room by short impulses, like a 
squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. At 
length, as I leaned with my elbow on the bench 
one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my 
sleeve, and round and round the paper which 
held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, 
and dodged and played at bo-peep with it 
and when at last I held still a piece of cheese 
between my thumb and finger, it came and nib- 
bled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward 
cleaned its face and paws, like a fly, and walked 
away. 

A phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin 
for protection in a pine which grew against the 
house. In June the partridge (Tetrao umhellus), 
which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my 
windows, from the woods in the rear to the front 
of my house, clucking and calling to them like 
a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself 
the hen of the woods. The young suddenly 
disperse on your approach, at a signal from the 
mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away, 
and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves 
and twigs that many a traveller has placed his 
foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the whir 
of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious 
calls and mewing, or seen her trail her wings 
to attract his attention, without suspecting their 
neighborhood. The parent will sometimes roll 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS 301 

and spin round before you in such a dishabille, 
that you cannot, for a few moments, detect what 
kind of creature it is. The young squat still 
and flat, often running their heads under a leaf, 
and mind only their mother's directions given 
from a distance, nor will your approach make 
them run again and betray themselves. You 
may even tread on them, or have your eyes on 
them for a minute, without discovering them. I 
have held them in my open hand at such a time, 
and still their only care, obedient to their mother 
and their instinct, was to squat there without 
fear or trembling. So perfect is this instinct, 
that once, when I had laid them on the leaves 
again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it 
was found with the rest in exactly the same 
position ten minutes afterward. They are not 
callow like the young of most birds, but more 
perfectly developed and precocious even than 
chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent 
expression of their open and serene eyes is very 
memorable. All inteUigence seems reflected in 
them. They suggest not merely the purity of 
infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. 
Such an eye was not born when the bird was, 
but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods 
do not yield another such gem. The traveller 
does not often look into such a limpid well. The 
ignorant or reckless sportsman often shoots the 
parent at such a time, and leaves these inno- 



302 WALDEN 

cents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or 
bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying 
leaves which they so much resemble. It is 
said that when hatched by a hen they will di- 
rectly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost, 
for they never hear the mother's call which 
gathers them again. These were my hens and 
chickens. 

It is remarkable how many creatures live 
wild and free though secret in the woods, and 
still sustain themselves in the neighborhood of 
towns, suspected by hunters only. How retired 
the otter manages to live here ! He grows to 
be four feet long, as big as a small boy, perhaps 
without any human being getting a glimpse of 
him. I formerly saw the raccoon in the woods 
behind where my house is built, and prob- 
ably still heard their whinnering at night. Com- 
monly I rested an hour or two in the shade at 
noon, after planting, and ate my lunch, and 
read a little by a spring which was the source of 
a swamp and of a brook, oozing from under 
Brister's Hill, half a mile from my field. The 
approach to this was through a succession of 
descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch- 
pines, into a larger wood about the swamp. 
There, in a very secluded and shaded spot, under 
a spreading white-pine, there was yet a clean 
firm sward to sit on. I had dug out the spring 
and made a well of clear gray water, where I 




Bristers Spring 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS 303 

could dip up a pailful without roiling it, and 
thither I went for this purpose almost every 
day in midsummer, when the pond was warmest. 
Thither too the wood-cock led her brood, to 
probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot above 
them down the bank, while they ran in a troop 
beneath; but at last, spying me, she would 
leave her young and circle round and round me, 
nearer and nearer till within four or five feet, 
pretending broken wings and legs, to attract my 
attention, and get off her young, who would 
already have taken up their march, with faint 
wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she 
directed. Or I heard the peep of the young 
when I could not see the parent bird. There 
too the turtle-doves sat over the spring, or 
fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white- 
pines over my head; or the red squirrel, cours- 
ing down the nearest bough, was particularly 
familiar and inquisitive. You only need sit still 
long enough in some attractive spot in the woods 
that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves 
to you by turns. 

I was witness to events of a less peaceful 
character. One day when I went out to my 
w^ood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I ob- 
served two large ants, the one red, the other 
much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, 
fiercely contending with one another. Having 
once got hold they never let go, but struggled 



304 WALDEN 

and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. 
Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the 
chips were covered with such combatants, that 
it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between 
two races of ants, the red always pitted against 
the black, and frequently two red ones to one 
black. The legions of these Myrmidons cov- 
ered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, 
and the ground was already strewn with the 
dead and dying, both red and black. It was 
the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the 
only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was 
raging; internecine war; the red republicans 
on the one hand, and the black imperialists on 
the other. On every side they were engaged in 
deadly combat, yet without any noise that I 
could hear, and human soldiers never fought so 
resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast 
locked in each other's embraces, in a little sunny 
valley amid the chips, now at noonday prepared 
to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. 
The smaller red champion had fastened himself 
like a vice to his adversary's front, and through 
all the tumblings on that field never for an in- 
stant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near 
the root, having already caused the other to go 
by the board; while the stronger black one 
dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on 
looking nearer, had already divested him of 
several of his members. They fought with more 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS 305 

pertinacity than bull-dogs. Neither manifested 
the least disposition to retreat. It was evident 
that their battle-cry was Conquer or die. In the 
meanwhile there came along a single red ant on 
the hill side of this valley, evidently full of ex- 
citement, who either had despatched his foe, 
or had not yet taken part in the battle; prob- 
ably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs ; 
whose mother had charged him to return with 
his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was 
some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath 
apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue 
his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat 
from afar, — for the blacks were nearly twice 
the size of the red, — he drew near with rapid 
pace till he stood on his guard within half an 
inch of the combatants; then, watching his op- 
portunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, 
and commenced his operations near the root 
of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select 
among his own members; and so there were 
three united for life, as if a new kind of attrac- 
tion had been invented which put all other locks 
and cements to shame. I should not have 
wondered by this time to find that they had their 
respective musical bands stationed on some 
eminent chip, and playing their national airs 
the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying 
combatants. I was myself excited somewhat 
even as if they had been men. The more you 



306 WALDEN 

think of it, the less the difference. And cer- 
tainly there is not the fight recorded in Con- 
cord history, at least, if in the history of America, 
that will bear a moment's comparison with this, 
whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for 
the patriotism and heroism displayed. For 
numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz 
or Dresden. Concord Fight ! Two killed on 
the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard 
wounded ! Why, here every ant was a But- 
trick, — *'Fire ! for God's sake fire !" — and 
thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. 
There was not one hireling there. I have no 
doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as 
much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three- 
penny tax on their tea; and the results of this 
battle will be as important and memorable to 
those whom it concerns as those of the battle of 
Bunker Hill, at least. 

I took up the chip on which the three I have 
particularly described were struggling, carried 
it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler 
on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. 
Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned 
red ant, I saw that, though he w^as assiduously 
gnawing at the near fore-leg of his enemy, hav- 
ing severed his remaining feeler, his own breast 
was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had 
there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose 
breastplate was apparently too thick for him to 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS 307 

pierce ; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's 
eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could 
excite. They struggled half an hour longer 
under the tumbler, and when I looked again 
the black soldier had severed the heads of his 
foes from their bodies, and the still living heads 
were hanging on either side of him like ghastly 
trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as 
firmly fastened as ever,, and he was endeavor- 
ing with feeble struggles, being without feelers 
and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know 
not how many other wounds, to divest himself 
of them; which at length, after half an hour 
more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and 
he went off over the window-sill in that crippled 
state. Whether he finally survived that com- 
bat, and spent the remainder of his days in some 
Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I 
thought that his industry would not be worth 
much thereafter. I never learned which party 
w^as victorious, nor the cause of the war; but I 
felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my 
feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing 
the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a hu- 
man battle before my door. 

Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of 
ants have long been celebrated and the date of 
them recorded, though they say that Huber is 
the only modern author who appears to have 
witnessed them. **^neas Sylvius," say they. 



308 WALDEN 

"after giving a very circumstantial account of 
one contested with great obstinacy by a great 
and small species on the trunk of a pear tree," 
adds that '' *This action was fought in the pontifi- 
cate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of 
Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who 
related the whole history of the battle with the 
greatest fidelity.' A similar engagement be- 
tween great and small ants is recorded by Olaus 
Magnus, in which the small ones, being victori- 
ous, are said to have buried the bodies of their 
own soldiers, but left those of their giant ene- 
mies a prey to the birds. This event happened 
previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Christiern 
the Second from Sweden." The battle which I 
witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, 
five years before the passage of Webster's Fugi- 
tive-Slave Bill. 

Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud- 
turtle in a victualling cellar, sported his heavy 
quarters in the woods, without the knowledge 
of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old 
fox burrows and woodchucks' holes; led per- 
chance by some slight cur which nimbly threaded 
the wood, and might still inspire a natural ter- 
ror in its denizens; now far behind his guide, 
barking like a canine bull toward some small 
squirrel which had treed itself for scrutiny, then, 
cantering off, bending the bushes with his 
weight, imagining that he is on the track of 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS 309 

some stray member of the jerbilla family. Once 
I was surprised to see a cat walking along the 
stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander 
so far from home. The surprise was mutual. 
Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has 
lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home 
in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy be- 
havior, proves herself more native there than 
the regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying, 
I met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, 
quite wild, and they all, like their mother, had 
their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. 
A few years before I lived in the woods there 
was what was called a "winged cat" in one of 
the farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, 
Mr. Gilian Baker's. When I called to see her in 
June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, 
as was her wont (I am not sure whether it was a 
male or female, and so use the more common 
pronoun) , but her mistress told me that she came 
into the neighborhood a little more than a year 
before, in April, and was finally taken into their 
house; that she was of a dark brownish gray 
color, w^th a white spot on her throat, and white 
feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that 
in the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out 
along her sides, forming strips ten or twelve 
inches long by tw^o and a half wide, and under 
her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the 
under matted like felt, and in the spring these 



310 WALDEN 

appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair 
of her *' wings," which I keep still. There is no 
appearance of a membrane about them. Some 
thought it was part flying squirrel or some other 
wild animal, which is not impossible, for, ac- 
cording to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been 
produced by the union of the marten and do- 
mestic cat. This would have been the right kind 
of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any ; for why 
should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his 
horse ? 

In the fall the loon {Colymhus glacialis) came, 
as usual, to moult and bathe in the pond, mak- 
ing the woods ring with his wild laughter be- 
fore I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the 
Mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and 
on foot, two by two and three by three, with 
patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. 
They come rustling through the woods like au- 
tumn leaves, at least ten men to one loon. Some 
station themselves on this side of the pond, 
some on that, for the poor bird cannot be om- 
nipresent; if he dive here he must come up 
there. But now the kind October wind rises, 
rustling the leaves and rippling the surface of 
the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, 
though his foes sweep the pond with spy-glasses, 
and make the woods resound with their dis- 
charges. The waves generously rise and dash 
angrily, taking sides with all water-fowl, and our 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS 311 

sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and shop 
and unfinished jobs. But they were too often 
successful. When I went to get a pail of water 
early in the morning I frequently saw this 
stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few 
rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, 
in order to see how he would manoeuvre, he 
would dive and be completely lost, so that I did 
not discover him again, sometimes, till the latter 
part of the day. But I was more than a match 
for him on the surface. He commonly went off 
in a rain. 

As I was paddling along the north shore one 
very calm October afternoon, for such days es- 
pecially they settle on to the lakes, like the milk- 
weed down, having looked in vain over the pond 
for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the 
shore toward the middle a few rods in front of 
me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. 
I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when 
he came up I was nearer than before. He dived 
again, but I miscalculated the direction he 
would take, and we were fifty rods apart when 
he came to the surface this time, for I had helped 
to widen the interval ; and again he laughed 
long and loud, and with more reason than be- 
fore. He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could 
not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each 
time, when he came to the surface, turning his 
head this way and that, he coolly surveyed the 



312 WALDEN 

water and the land, and apparently chose his 
course so that he might come up where there was 
the widest expanse of water and at the greatest 
.distance from the boat. It was surprising how 
quickly he made up his mind and put his re- 
solve into execution. He led me at once to the 
widest part of the pond, and could not be driven 
from it. While he was thinking one thing in 
his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his 
thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played 
on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against 
a loon. Suddenly your adversary's checker dis- 
appears beneath the board, and the problem is 
to place yours nearest to where his will appear 
again. Sometimes he would come up unex- 
pectedly on the opposite side of me, having 
apparently passed directly under the boat. So 
long-winded was he and so unweariable, that 
when he had swum farthest he would immedi- 
ately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no 
wit could divine where in the deep pond, be- 
neath the smooth surface, he might be speed- 
ing his way like a fish, for he had time and ability 
to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest 
part. It is said that loons have been caught in 
the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the sur- 
face, with hooks set for trout, — though Walden 
is deeper than that. How surprised must the 
fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from an- 
other sphere speeding his way amid their schools ! 



• BRUTE NEIGHBORS 313 

Yet he appeared to know his course as surely 
under water as on the surface, and swam much 
faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where 
he approached the surface, just put his head out 
to reconnoitre, and instantly dived again. I 
found that it was as well for me to rest on my 
oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to 
calculate where he would rise; for again and 
again, when I was straining my eyes over the 
surface one way, I would suddenly be startled 
by his unearthly laugh behind me. But why, 
after displaying so much cunning, did he in- 
variably betray himself the moment he came up 
by that loud laugh ? Did not his white breast 
enough betray him ? He was indeed a silly loon, 
I thought. I could commonly hear the plash of 
the water when he came up, and so also de- 
tected him. But after an hour he seemed as 
fresh as ever, dived as willingly and swam yet 
farther than at first. It was surprising to see 
how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast 
when he came to the surface, doing all the 
work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual 
note was this dem6niac laughter, yet somewhat 
like that of a water-fowl; but occasionally, 
when he had balked me most successfully and 
come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn 
unearthly howl, probably more like that of a 
wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts his 
muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. 



314 WALDEN 

This was his looning, — perhaps the wildest 
sound that is ever heard here, making the woods 
ring far and wide. I concluded that he laughed 
in derision of my efforts, confident of his own re- 
sources. Though the sky was by this time over- 
cast, the pond was so smooth that I could see 
where he broke the surface when I did not hear 
him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, 
and the smoothness of the water were all against 
him. At length, having come up fifty rods off, 
he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if 
calling on the god of loons to aid him, and im- 
mediately there came a wind from the east and 
rippled the surface, and filled the whole air 
with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it 
were the prayer of the loon answered, and 
his god was angry with me ; and so I left him 
disappearing far away on the tumultuous sur- 
face. 

For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks 
cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of 
the pond, far from the sportsman; tricks which 
they will have less need to practice in Louisiana 
bayous. When compelled to rise they would 
sometimes circle round and round and over the 
pond at a considerable height, from which they 
could easily see to other ponds and the river, 
like black motes in the sky ; and when I thought 
they had gone off thither long since, they would 
settle down by a slanting flight of a quarter 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS 815 

of a mile on to a distant part which was left 
free; but what besides safety they got by sail- 
ing in the middle of Walden I do not know, 
unless they love its water for the same reason 
that I do. 



XIII 

HOUSE-WARMING 

IN October I went a-graping to the river 
meadows, and loaded myself with clusters 
more precious for their beauty and fragrance 
than for food. There too I admired, though I 
did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen 
gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly 
and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly 
rake, leaving the smooth meadow in a snarl, 
heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and 
the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads 
to Boston and New York; destined to be 
jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature 
there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison 
out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn 
and drooping plant. The barberry's brilliant 
fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but 
I collected a small store of wild apples for cod- 
dling, which the proprietors and travellers had 
overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid 
up half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting 
at that season to roam the then boundless chest- 
nut woods of Lincoln, — they now sleep their 
long sleep under the railroad, — with a bag on 



HOUSE-WARMING 317 

my shoulder, and a stick to open burrs with in 
my hand, for I did not always wait for the frost, 
amid the rustling of leaves and the loud re- 
proofs of the red-squirrels and the jays, whose 
half-consumed nuts I sometimes stole, for the 
burrs which they had selected were sure to con- 
tain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and 
shook the trees. They grew also behind my 
house, and one large tree which almost over- 
shadowed it was, when in flower, a bouquet 
which scented the whole neighborhood, but the 
squirrels and the jays got most of its fruit ; the 
last coming in flocks early in the morning and 
picking the nuts out of the burrs before they fell. 
I relinquished these trees to them and visited 
the more distant woods composed wholly of 
chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were 
a good substitute for bread. Many other sub- 
stitutes might, perhaps, be found. Digging one 
day for fish-worms I discovered the ground-nut 
{Apios tuherosa) on its string, the potato of the 
aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which I had 
begun to doubt if I had ever dug and eaten in 
childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed 
it. I had often since seen its crimpled red vel- 
vety blossom supported by the stems of other 
plants without knowing it to be the same. Cul- 
tivation has well-nigh exterminated it. It has 
a sweetish taste, much like that of a frostbitten 
potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. 



318 WALDEN 

This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature 
to rear her own children and feed them simply 
here at some future period. In these days of 
fatted cattle and waving grain-fields, this hum- 
ble root, which was once the totem of an Indian 
tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its 
flowering vine ; but let wild Nature reign here 
once more, and the tender and luxurious English 
grains will probably disappear before a myriad 
of foes, and without the care of man the crow 
may carry back even the last seed of corn to the 
great cornfield of the Indian's God in the south- 
west, whence he is said to have brought it; but 
the now almost exterminated ground-nut will 
perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and 
wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume 
its ancient importance and dignity as the diet 
of the hunter tribe. Some Indian Ceres or Mi- 
nerva must have been the inventor and bestower 
of it; and when the reign of poetry commences 
here, its leaves and string of nuts may be repre- 
sented on our works of art. 

Already, by the first of September, I had seen 
two or three small maples turned scarlet across 
the pond, beneath where the white stems of 
three aspens diverged, at the point of a prom- 
ontory, next the water. Ah, many a tale their 
color told ! And gradually from week to week 
the character of each tree came out, and it ad- 
mired itself reflected in the smooth mirror of 



HOUSE-WARMING 319 

the lake. Each morning the manager of this 
gallery substituted some new picture, distin- 
guished by more brilliant or harmonious color- 
ing, for the old upon the walls. 

The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in 
October, as to winter quarters, and settled on 
my windows within and on the walls overhead, 
sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each 
morning, when they were numbed with cold, I 
swept some of them out, but I did not trouble 
myself much to get rid of them ; I even felt com- 
plimented by their regarding my house as a 
desirable shelter. They never molested me seri- 
ously, though they bedded with me; and they 
gradually disappeared, into what crevices I do 
not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable 
cold. 

Like the wasps, before I finally went into 
winter quarters in November, I used to resort 
to the northeast side of Walden, which the sun, 
reflected from the pitch-pine woods and the 
stony shore, made the fireside of the pond ; it is 
so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be 
warmed by the sun while you can be, than by 
an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the 
still glowing embers which the summer, like a 
departed hunter, had left. 

When I came to build my chimney I studied 
masonry. My bricks being second-hand ones 



320 WALDEN 

required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that I 
learned more than usual of the qualities of 
bricks and trowels. The mortar on them was 
fifty years old, and was said to be still growing 
harder; but this is one of those sayings which 
men love to repeat whether they are true or not. 
Such sayings themselves grow harder and ad- 
here more firmly with age, and it would take 
many blows with a trowel to clean an old wise- 
acre of them. Many of the villages of Mesopo- 
tamia are built of second-hand bricks of a very 
good quality, obtained from the ruins of Baby- 
lon, and the cement on them is older and prob- 
ably harder still. However that may be, I was 
struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel 
which bore so many violent blows without being 
worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney 
before, though I did not read the name of Neb- 
uchadnezzar on them, I picked out as many 
fireplace bricks as I could find, to save work and 
waste, and I filled the spaces between the bricks 
about the fireplace with stones from the pond 
shore, and also made my mortar with the white 
sand from the same place. I lingered most 
about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the 
house. Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that 
though I commenced at the ground in the morn- 
ing, a course of bricks raised a few inches above 
the floor served for my pillow at night ; yet I did 
not get a stiff neck for it that I remember; my 



HOUSE-WARMING 321 

stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to 
board for a fortnight about those times, which 
caused me to be put to it for room. He brought 
his own knife, though I had two, and we used to 
scour them by thrusting them into the earth. 
He shared with me the labors of cooking. I was 
pleased to see my work rising so square and 
solid by degrees, and reflected that, if it pro- 
ceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a 
long time. The chimney is to some extent an 
independent structure, standing on the ground 
and rising through the house to the heavens; 
even after the house is burned it still stands 
sometimes, and its importance and independ- 
ence are apparent. This was toward the end 
of summer. It was now November. 

The north wind had already begun to cool the 
pond, though it took many weeks of steady 
blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. When I 
began to have a fire at evening, before I plas- 
tered my house, the chimney carried smoke 
particularly well, because of the numerous chinks 
between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful 
evenings in that cool and airy apartment, sur- 
rounded by the rough brown boards full of 
knots, and rafters with the bark on high over- 
head. My house never pleased my eye so much 
after it was plastered, though I was obliged to 
confess that it was more comfortable. Should 

11 



S22 WALDEN 

not every apartment in which man dwells be 
lofty enough to create some obscurity over- 
head, where flickering shadows may play at 
evening about the rafters ? These forms are 
more agreeable to the fancy and imagination 
than fresco paintings or other the most expen- 
sive furniture. I now first began to inhabit my 
house, I may say, when I began to use it for 
warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple of 
old fire-dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, 
and it did me good to see the soot form on the 
back of the chimney which I had built, and I 
poked the fire with more right and more satis- 
faction than usual. My dwelling was small, 
and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but 
it seemed larger for being a single apartment 
and remote from neighbors. All the attractions 
of a house were concentrated in one room; it 
was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping- 
room; and whatever satisfaction parent or 
child, master or servant, derive from living in a 
house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master 
of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his 
rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia 
multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, 
et virtuti, et glorise erit," that is, "an oil and wine 
cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant 
to expect hard times; it will be for his advan- 
tage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar 
a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas 



HOUSE-WARMING 323 

with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little 
rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian 
meal a peck each. 

I sometimes dream of a larger and more popu- 
lous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring 
materials, and without gingerbread-work, which 
shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, 
substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or 
plastering, with bare rafters and purlins sup- 
porting a sort of lower heaven over one's head, 
— useful to keep off rain and snow ; where the 
king and queen posts stand out to receive your 
homage, when you have done reverence to the 
prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping 
over the sill ; a cavernous house, wherein you 
must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the 
roof; where some may live in the fireplace, 
some in the recess of a window, and some on 
settles, some at one end of the hall, some at 
another, and some aloft on rafters with the 
spiders, if they choose ; a house which you have 
got into when you have opened the outside 
door, and the ceremony is over; where the 
weary traveller may wash, and eat, and con- 
verse, and sleep, without further journey; such 
a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a 
tempestuous night, containing all the essentials 
of a house, and nothing for house-keeping, where 
you can see all the treasures of the house at 
one view, and everything hangs upon its peg 



324 WALDEN 

that a man should use ; at once kitchen, pantry, 
parlor, chamber, store-house, and garret ; where 
you can see so necessary a thing as a barrel or a 
ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, 
and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to 
the fire that cooks your dinner and the oven 
that bakes your bread, and the necessary furni- 
ture and utensils are the chief ornaments ; where 
the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the 
mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes re- 
quested to move from off the trap-door, when 
the cook would descend into the cellar, and so 
learn whether the ground is solid or hollow 
beneath you without stamping. A house whose 
inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, 
and you cannot go in at the front door and out 
at the back without seeing some of its inhabit- 
ants ; where to be a guest is to be presented with 
the freedom of the house, and not to be care- 
fully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up 
in a particular cell, and told to make yourself 
at home there, — in solitary confinement. Now- 
adays the host does not admit you to his hearth, 
but has got the mason to build one for yourself 
somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the 
art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There 
is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had 
a design to poison you. I am aware that I have 
been on many a man's premises, and might 
have been legally ordered off, but I am not aware 



HOUSE-WARMING 325 

that I have been in many men's houses. I 
might visit in my old clothes a king and queen 
who lived simply in such a house as I have 
described, if I were going their way ; but back- 
ing out of a modern palace will be all that I 
shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one. 

It would seem as if the very language of our 
parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate 
into parlaver wholly, our lives pass at such 
remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors 
and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through 
slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other 
words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and 
workshop. The dinner even is only the parable 
of a dinner, commonly. As if only the savage 
dwelt near enough to Nature and Truth to 
borrow a trope from them. How can the 
scholar, who dwells away in the North West 
Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is parlia- 
mentary in the kitchen ? 

However, only one or two of my guests were 
ever bold enough to stay and eat a hasty-pudding 
with me; but when they saw that crisis ap- 
proaching they beat a hasty retreat rather, as 
if it would shake the house to its foundations. 
Nevertheless, it stood through a great many 
hasty-puddings. 

I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. 
I brought over some whiter and cleaner sand 
for this purpose from the opposite shore of the 



326 WALDEN 

pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which 
would have tempted me to go much farther if 
necessary. My house had in the meanwhile 
been shingled down to the ground on every 
side. In lathing I was pleased to be able to 
send home each nail with a single blow of the 
hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the 
plaster from the board to the wall neatly and 
rapidly. I remembered the story of a conceited 
fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge 
about the village once, giving advice to work- 
men. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for 
words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a plaster- 
er's board, and having loaded his trowel with- 
out mishap, with a complacent look toward the 
lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thither- 
ward; and straightway, to his complete dis- 
comfiture, received the whole contents in his 
ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economy 
and convenience of plastering, which so effectu- 
ally shuts out the cold and takes a handsome 
finish, and I learned the various casualties to 
which the plasterer is liable. I was surprised 
to see how thirsty the bricks were, which drank 
up all the moisture in my plaster before I had 
smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water 
it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the 
previous winter made a small quantity of lime 
by burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis, 
which our river affords, for the sake of the ex- 



HOUSE-WARMING 327 

periment; so that I knew where my materials 
came from. I raight have got good hmestone 
within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I 
had cared to do so. 

The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed 
over in the shadiest and shallowest coves, some 
days or even weeks before the general freezing. 
The first ice is especially interesting and per- 
fect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and 
affords the best opportunity that ever offers for 
examining the bottom where it is shallow; for 
you can lie at your length on ice only an inch 
thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the 
water, and study the bottom at your leisure, 
only two or three inches distant, like a picture 
behind a glass, and the water is necessarily 
always smooth then. There are many furrows 
in the sand where some creature has travelled 
about and doubled on its tracks ; and, for wrecks, 
it is strewn with the cases of caddis worms made 
of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these 
have creased it, for you find some of their cases 
in the furrows, though they are deep and broad 
for them to make. But the ice itself is the object 
of most interest, though you must improve the 
earliest opportunity to study it. If you examine 
it closely the morning after it freezes, you find 
that the greater part of the bubbles, which at 
first appeared to be within it, are against its 
under surface, and that more are continually 



328 WALDEN 

rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet 
comparatively soUd and dark, that is, you see 
the water through it. These bubbles are from 
an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, 
very clear and beautiful, and you see your face 
reflected in them through the ice. There may 
be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. 
There are also already within the ice narrow 
oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an 
inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward; 
or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spheri- 
cal bubbles, one directly above another, like a 
string of beads. But these within the ice are 
not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. 
I sometimes used to cast on stones to try the 
strength of the ice, and those which broke 
through carried in air with them, which formed 
very large and conspicuous white bubbles be- 
neath. One day when I came to the same place 
forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those 
large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch 
more of ice had formed, as I could see distinctly 
by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the 
last two days had been very warm, like an Indian 
summer, the ice was not now transparent, show- 
ing the dark green color of the water, and the 
bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and 
though twice as thick was hardly stronger than 
before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded 
under this heat and run together, and lost their 



HOUSE-WARMING 329 

regularity; they were no longer one directly 
over another, but often like silvery coins poured 
from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin 
flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The 
beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late 
to study the bottom. Being curious to know 
what position my great bubbles occupied with 
regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake con- 
taining a middling-sized one, and turned it bot- 
tom upward. The new ice had formed around 
and under the bubble, so that it was included 
between the two ices. It was wholly in the 
lower ice, but close against the upper, and was 
flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a 
rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep by four 
inches in diameter; and I was surprised to find 
that directly under the bubble the ice was 
melted with great regularity in the form of a 
saucer reversed, to the height of five-eighths of 
an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition 
there between the water and the bubble, hardly 
an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places 
the small bubbles in this partition had burst 
out downward, and probably there was no ice 
at all under the largest bubbles, which were a 
foot in diameter. I inferred that the infinite 
number of minute bubbles which I had first 
seen against the under surface of the ice were 
now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its 
degree, had operated like a burning-glass on 



330 WALDEN 

the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These are 
the little air guns which contribute to make the 
ice crack and whoop. 

At length the winter set in in good earnest, 
just as I had finished plastering, and the wind 
began to howl around the house as if it had not 
had permission to do so till then. Night after 
night the geese came lumbering in in the dark 
with a clangor and a whistling of wings, even 
after the ground was covered with snow, some 
to alight in Walden, and some flying low over 
the woods toward Fair-Haven, bound for Mex- 
ico. Several times, when returning from the 
village at ten or eleven o'clock at night, I heard 
the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on 
the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole 
behind my dwelling, where they had come up 
to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their 
leader as they hurried off. In 1845 Walden 
froze entirely over for the first time on the night 
of the 22d of December, Flint's and other 
shallower ponds and the river having been frozen 
ten days or more; in '46, the 16th; in '49, about 
the 31st; and in '50, about the 27th of Decem- 
ber; in '52, the 5th of January; in '53, the 
31st of December. The snow had already 
covered the ground since the 25th of November, 
and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery 
of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, 



HOUSE-WARMING 331 

and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within 
my house and within my breast. My employ- 
ment out of doors now was to collect the dead 
wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on 
my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead pine 
tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest 
fence which had seen its best days was a great 
haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was 
past serving the god Terminus. How much 
more interesting an event is that man's supper 
who has just been forth in the snow to hunt, 
nay, you may say, steal, the fuel to cook it with ! 
His bread and meat are sweet. There are 
enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in 
the forests of most of our towns to support many 
fires, but which at present warm none, and, 
some think, hinder the growth of the young 
Wood. There was also the drift-wood of the 
pond. In the course of the summer I had dis- 
covered a raft of pitch-pine logs with the bark 
on, pinned together by the Irish when the rail- 
road was built. This I hauled up partly on the 
shore. After soaking two years and then lying 
high six months it was perfectly sound, though 
waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one 
winter day with sliding this piece-meal across 
the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind 
with one end of a log fifteen feet long on my 
shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied 
several logs together with a birch withe, and 



332 WALDEN 

then, with a longer birch or alder which had a 
hook at the end, dragged them across. Though 
completely waterlogged and almost as heavy 
as lead, they not only burned long, but made 
a very hot fire ; nay, I thought that they burned 
better for the soaking, as if the pitch, being 
confined by the water, burned longer as in a 
lamp. 

Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers 
of England, says that "the encroachments of 
trespassers, and the houses and fences thus raised 
on the borders of the forest," were "considered 
as great nuisances by the old forest law, and 
were severely punished under the name of "pur- 
prestures, as tending ad terror em jerarum — ad 
nocumentum forestce, &c.," to the frightening of 
the game and the detriment of the forest. But 
I was interested in the preservation of the veni- 
son and the vert more than the hunters or wood- 
choppers, and as much as though I had been 
the Lord Warden himself; and if any part was 
burned, though I burned it myself by accident, 
I grieved with a grief that lasted longer and 
was more inconsolable than that of the proprie- 
tors; nay, I grieved when it was cut down by 
the proprietors themselves. I would that our 
farmers when they cut down a forest felt some 
of that awe which the old Romans did when 
they came to thin, or let in the light to, a conse- 
crated grove {lucum conlucare), that is, would 



HOUSE-WARMING 333 

believe that it is sacred to some god. The 
Roman made an expiatory offering, and prayed. 
Whatever god or goddess thou art to whom this 
grove is sacred, be propitious to me, my family, 
and children, &c. 

It is remarkable what a value is still put upon 
wood even in this age and in this new country, 
a value more permanent and universal than that 
of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions 
no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as pre- 
cious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman 
ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we 
make our gun-stocks of it. IVIichaux, more than 
thirty years ago, says that the price of wood for 
fuel in New York and Philadelphia *' nearly 
equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the best 
wood in Paris, though this immense capital an- 
nually requires more than three hundred thou- 
sand cords, and is surrounded to the distance 
of three hundred miles by cultivated plains." 
In this town the price of wood rises almost 
steadily, and the only question is, how much 
higher it is to be this year than it was the last. 
Mechanics and tradesmen who come in person 
to the forest on no other errand, are sure to 
attend the wood auction, and even pay a high 
price for the privilege of gleaning after the wood- 
chopper. It is now many years that men have 
resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials 
of the arts; the New Englander and the New 



334 WALDEN 

Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer 
and Robinhood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, 
in most parts of the world the prince and the 
peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally 
require still a few sticks from the forest to warm 
them and cook their food. Neither could I do 
without them. 

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind 
of affection. I loved to have mine before my 
window, and the more chips the better to remind 
me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which 
nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter 
days, on the sunny side of the house, I played 
about the stumps which I had got out of my 
beanfield. As my driver prophesied when I was 
ploughing, th% warffl^'d me twice, once while I 
was splitting them, and again when they were 
on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more 
heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the 
village blacksmith to "jump" it; but I jumped 
him, and, putting a hickory helve from the 
woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, it was 
at least hung true. 

A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. 
It is interesting to remember how much of this 
food for fire is still concealed in the bowels of 
the earth. In previous years I had often gone 
** prospecting" over some bare hill side, where 
a pitch-pine wood had formerly stood, and got 
out the fat pine roots. They are almost inde- 



HOUSE-WARMING 335 

structible. Stumps thirty or forty years old, at 
least, will still be sound at the core, though the 
sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as 
appears by the scales of the thick bark forming 
a ring level with the earth four or five inches dis- 
tant from the heart. With axe and shovel you 
explore this mine, and follow the marrowy 
store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had 
struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth. 
But commonly I kindled my fire with the dry 
leaves of the forest, which I had stored up in 
my shed before the snow came. Green hickory 
finely split makes the wood-chopper's kind- 
lings, when he has a camp in the woods. Once 
in a while I got a little of this. When the vil- 
lagers were lighting their fires beyond the hori- 
zon, I too gave notice to the various wild inhabi- 
tants of Walden vale, by a smoky streamer from 
my chimney, that I was awake. — 

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird, 
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, 
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn. 
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest; 
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form 
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts; 
By night star-veiling, and by day 
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun; 
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth, 
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame. 

Hard green wood just cut, though I used but 
little of that, answered my purpose better than 



336 WALDEN 

any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I 
went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and 
when I returned, three or four hours afterward, 
it would be still alive and glowing. My house 
was not empty though I was gone. It was as if 
I had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It 
was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly 
my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One day, 
however, as I was splitting wood, I thought that 
I would just look in at the window and see if the 
house was not on fire ; it was the only time I re- 
member to have been particularly anxious on 
this score ; so I looked and saw that a spark had 
caught my bed, and I went in and extinguished 
it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. 
But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered 
a position, and its roof was so low, that I could 
afford to let the fire go out in the middle of al- 
most any winter day. 

The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every 
third potato, and making a snug bed even there 
of some hair left after plastering and of brown 
paper; for even the wildest animals love com- 
fort and warmth as well as man, and they sur- 
vive the winter only because they are so careful 
to secure them. Some of my friends spoke as 
if I was coming to the woods on purpose to 
freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed, 
which he warms with his body in a sheltered 
place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes 



HOUSE-WARMING 337 

up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms 
that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his 
bed, in which he can move about divested of 
more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of 
summer in the midst of winter, and by means of 
windows even admit the light, and with a lamp 
lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or 
two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for 
the fine arts. Though, when I had been ex- 
posed to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole 
body began to grow torpid, when I reached the 
genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered 
my faculties and prolonged my life. But the 
most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in 
this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to 
speculate how the human race may be at last 
destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads 
any time with a little sharper blast from the 
north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and 
Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or 
greater snow, would put a period to man's ex- 
istence on the globe. 

The next winter I used a small cooking-stove 
for economy, since I did not own the forest ; but 
it did not keep fire so well as the open fire-place. 
Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer 
a poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will 
soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that 
we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the 
Indian fashion. The stove not only took up 



338 WALDEN 

room and scented the house, but it concealed 
the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. 
You can always see a face in the fire. The la- 
borer, looking into it at evening, purifies his 
thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they 
have accumulated during the day. But I could 
no longer sit and look into the fire, and the perti- 
nent words of a poet recurred to me with new 
force. — 

"Never, bright flame, may be denied to me 
Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy. 
What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright ? 
What but my fortunes sunk so low in night ? 

"Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall. 
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all ? 
Was thy existence then too fanciful 
For our life's common light, who are so dull ? 
Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold 
With our congenial souls ? secrets too bold ? 
Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit 
Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit. 
Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire 
Warms feet and hands — nor does to more aspire ; 
By whose compact utilitarian heap 
The present may sit down and go to sleep. 
Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked. 
And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked." 



XIV 

FORMER INHABITANTS; AND WINTER VISITORS 

I WEATHERED some merry snow-storms, 
and spent some cheerful winter evenings by 
my fire-side, while the snow whirled wildly 
without, and even the hooting of the owl was 
hushed. For many weeks I met no one in my 
walks but those who came occasionally to cut 
wood and sled it to the village. The elements, 
however, abetted me in making a path through 
the deepest snow in the woods, for when I had 
once gone through the wind blew the oak leaves 
into my tracks, where they lodged, and by ab- 
sorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow, 
and so not only made a dry bed for my feet, but 
in the night their dark line was my guide. For 
human society I was obliged to conjure up the 
former occupants of these woods. Within the 
memory of many of my townsmen the road near 
which my house stands resounded with the 
laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods 
which border it were notched and dotted here 
and there with their little gardens and dwellings, 
though it was then much more shut in by the 
forest than now. In some places, within my 



340 WALDEN 

own remembrance, the pines would scrape 
both sides of a chaise at once, and women and 
children who were compelled to go this way to 
Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and 
often ran a good part of the distance. Though 
mainly but a humble route to neighboring vil- 
lages, or for the woodman's team, it once 
amused the traveller more than now by its vari- 
ety, and lingered longer in his memory. Where 
now firm open fields stretch from the village to 
the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp 
on a foundation of logs, the remnants of w^hich, 
doubtless, still underlie the present dusty high- 
way, from the Stratten, now the Alms House, 
Farm, to Brister's Hill. 

East of my beanfield, across the road, lived 
Cato Ingraham, slave of Duncan Ingraham, 
Esquire, gentleman of Concord village; who 
built his slave a house, and gave him permission 
to live in Walden Woods ; — Cato, not Uticen- 
sis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a 
Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember 
his little patch among the walnuts, which he let 
grow up till he should be old and need them ; 
but a younger and whiter speculator got them 
at last. He too, however, occupies an equally 
narrow house at present. Cato's half-obliter- 
ated cellar hole still remains, though known to 
few, being concealed from the traveller by a 
fringe of pines. It is now filled with the smooth 



FORMER INHABITANTS 341 

sumach {Rhus glabra), and one of the earliest 
species of goldenrod {Solidago stricta) grows 
there luxuriantly. 

Here, by the very corner of my field, still 
nearer to town, Zilpha, a colored woman, had 
her little house, where she spun linen for the 
townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with 
her shrill singing, for she had a loud and nota- 
ble voice. At length, in the war of 1812, her 
dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers, 
prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her 
cat and dog and hens were all burned up to- 
gether. She led a hard life, and somewhat in- 
humane. One old frequenter of these woods 
remembers that as he passed her house one noon 
he heard her muttering to herself over her gur- 
gling pot, — "Ye are all bones, bones !" I have 
seen bricks amid the oak copse there. 

Down the road, on the right hand, on Bris- 
ter's Hill, lived Brister Freeman, *'a handy 
Negro," slave of Squire Cummings once, — 
there where grow still the apple trees which 
Brister planted and tended ; large old trees now, 
but their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. 
Not long since I read his epitaph in the old 
Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, 
near the unmarked graves of some British gren- 
adiers who fell in the retreat from Concord, — 
where he is styled "Sippio Brister," — Scipio 
Africanus he had some title to be called, — ''a 



342 WALDEN 

man of color," as if he were discolored. It also 
told me, with staring emphasis, when he died; 
which was but an indirect way of informing me 
that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, 
his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet 
pleasantly, — large, round, and black, blacker 
than any of the children of night, such a 
dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or 
since. 

Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old 
road in the woods, are marks of some home- 
stead of the Stratten family; whose orchard 
once covered all the slope of Brister's Hill, 
but was long since killed out by pitch-pines, 
excepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish 
still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village 
tree. 

Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed's loca- 
tion, on the other side of the way, just on the 
edge of the wood ; ground famous for the pranks 
of a demon not distinctly named in old mythol- 
ogy, who has acted a prominent and astounding 
part in our New England life, and deserves, as 
much as any mythological character, to have 
his biography written one day; who first comes 
in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then 
robs and murders the whole family, — New 
England Rum. But history must not yet tell 
the tragedies enacted here ; let time intervene in 
some measure to assuage and lend an azure 




^ 












FORMER INHABITANTS 343 

tint to them. Here the most indistinct and du- 
bious tradition says that once a tavern stood; 
the well the same, which tempered the traveller's 
beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then 
men saluted one another, and heard and told the 
news, and went their ways again. 

Breed's hut was standing only a dozen years 
ago, though it had long been unoccupied. It 
was about the size of mine. It was set on fire 
by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I 
do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the vil- 
lage then, and had just lost myself over Dave- 
nant's Gondibert, that winter that I labored 
with a lethargy, — which, by the way, I never 
knew whether to regard as a family complaint, 
having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving him- 
self, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar 
Sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the 
Sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt 
to read Chalmers' collection of English poetry 
without skipping. It fairly overcame my Nervii. 
I had just sunk my head on this when the bells 
rang fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled 
that way, led by a straggling troop of men and 
boys, and I among the foremost, for I had leaped 
the brook. We thought it was far south over 
the woods, — we who had run to fires before, — 
barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all together. 
"It 's Baker's barn," cried one. ''It is the Cod- 
man Place," aflfirmed another. And then fresh 



344 WALDEN 

sparks went up above the wood, as if the roof 
fell in, and we all shouted ''Concord to the 
rescue!" Wagons shot past with furious speed 
and crushing loads, bearing, perchance, among 
the rest, the agent of the Insurance Company, 
who was bound to go however far; and ever 
and anon the engine bell tinkled behind, more 
slow and sure, and rearmost of all, as it was 
afterward whispered, came they who set the 
fire and gave the alarm. Thus we kept on like 
true idealists, rejecting the evidence of our 
senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the 
crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire 
from over the wall, and realized, alas ! that we 
were there. The very nearness of the fire but 
cooled our ardor. At first we thought to throw 
a frog-pond on to it; but concluded to let it 
burn, it was so far gone and so worthless. So 
we stood round our engine, jostled one another, 
expressed our sentiments through speaking trum- 
pets, or in lower tone referred to the great 
conflagrations which the world has witnessed, 
including Bascom's shop, and, between our- 
selves, we thought that, were we there in season 
with our "tub" and a full frog-pond by, we could 
turn that threatened last and universal one into 
another flood. We finally retreated without 
doing any mischief, — returned to sleep and 
Gondibert. But as for Gondibert, I would ex- 
cept that passage in the preface about wit being 



FORMER INHABITANTS 345 

the soul's powder, — "but most of mankind 
are strangers to wit, as Indians are to pow- 
der." 

It chanced that I walked that way across the 
fields the following night, about the same hour, 
and hearing a low moaning at this spot, I drew 
near in the dark, and discovered the only sur- 
vivor of the family that I know, the heir of both 
its virtues and its vices, who alone was interested 
in this burning, lying on his stomach and look- 
ing over the cellar wall at the still smouldering 
cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his 
W'Ont. He had been working far off in the river 
meadow all day, and had improved the first 
moments that he could call his own to visit the 
home of his fathers and his youth. He gazed 
into the cellar from all sides and points of view 
by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was 
some treasure, which he remembered, con- 
cealed between the stones, where there was ab- 
solutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. 
The house being gone, he looked at what there 
was left. He was soothed by the sympathy 
which my mere presence implied, and showed 
me, as well as the darkness permitted, where the 
well was covered up; which, thank Heaven, 
could never be burned; and he groped long 
about the wall to find the well-sweep which his 
father had cut and mounted, feeling for the iron 
hook or staple by which a burden had been 



346 WALDEN 

fastened to the heavy end, — all that he could 
now cling to, — to convince me that it was no 
common *' rider." I felt it, and still remark it 
almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the 
history of a family. 

Once more, on the left, where are seen the 
well and lilac bushes by the wall, in the now 
open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse. But 
to return toward Lincoln. 

Farther in the woods than any of these, where 
the road approaches nearest to the pond, Wy- 
man the potter squatted, and furnished his 
townsmen with earthen ware, and left descend- 
ants to succeed him. Neither were they rich in 
worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance 
while they lived; and there often the sheriff 
came in vain to collect the taxes, and "attached 
a chip," for form's sake, as I have read in his 
accounts, there being nothing else that he could 
lay his hands on. One day in midsummer, 
when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a 
load of pottery to market stopped his horse 
against my field and inquired concerning Wy- 
man the younger. He had long ago bought a 
potter's wheel of him, and wished to know what 
had become of him. I had read of the potter's 
clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never 
occurred to me that the pots we use were not 
such as had come down unbroken from those 
days, or grown on trees like gourds somewhere. 



FORMER INHABITANTS 347 

and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art 
was ever practised in my neighborhood. 

The last inhabitant of these woods before me 
was an Irishman, Hugh Quoil (if I have spelt 
his name with coil enough), who occupied Wy- 
man's tenement, — Col. Quoil, he was called. 
Rumor said that he had been a soldier at Water- 
loo. If he had lived I should have made him 
fight his battles over again. His trade here was 
that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena ; 
Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of 
him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like 
one who had seen the world, and was capable 
of more civil speech than you could well attend 
to. He wore a great coat in midsummer, being 
affected with the trembling delirium, and his 
face was the color of carmine. He died in the 
road at the foot of Brister's Hill shortly after I 
came to the woods, so that I have not remem- 
bered him as a neighbor. Before his house was 
pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as 
"an unlucky castle," I visited it. There lay his 
old clothes curled up by use, as if they were 
himself, upon his raised plank bed. His pipe 
lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl 
broken at the fountain. The last could never 
have been the symbol of his death, for he con- 
fessed to me that, though he had heard of Bris- 
ter's Spring, he had never seen it; and soiled 
cards, kings of diamonds, spades, and hearts. 



348 WALDEN 

were scattered over the floor. One black chicken 
which the administrator could not catch, black 
as night and as silent, not even croaking, await- 
ing Reynard, still went to roost in the next apart- 
ment. In the rear there was the dim outline of a 
a garden, which had been planted but had never 
received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible 
shaking fits, though it was now harvest time. 
It was overrun with Roman wormwood and 
beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for 
all fruit. The skin of a woodchuck was freshly 
stretched upon the back of the house, a trophy 
of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mit- 
tens would he want more. 

Now only a dent in the earth marks the site 
of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and 
strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel 
bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward 
there; some pitch-pine or gnarled oak occupies 
what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented 
black-birch, perhaps, waves where the door- 
stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, 
where once a spring oozed; now dry and tear- 
less grass ; or it was covered deep, — not to be 
discovered till some late day, — with a flat stone 
under the sod, when the last of the race departed. 
What a sorrowful act must that be, — the cov- 
ering up of wells ! coincident with the opening 
of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like de- 
serted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left 



FORMER INHABITANTS 349 

where once were the stir and bustle of human 
life, and '*fate, free-will, foreknowledge abso- 
lute," in some form and dialect or other were by 
turns discussed. But all I can learn of their con- 
clusions amounts to just this, that *'Cato and 
Brister pulled wool;" which is about as edify- 
ing as the history of more famous schools of 
philosophy. 

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation 
after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, 
unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, 
to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted 
and tended once by children's hands, in front- 
yard plots, — now standing by wall-sides in re- 
tired pastures, and giving place to new-rising 
forests ; — the last of that stirp, sole survivor of 
that family. Little did the dusky children think 
that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which 
they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the 
house and daily watered, would root itself so, 
and outlive them, and house itself in the rear 
that shaded it, and grow man's garden and 
orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone 
wanderer a half century after they had grown 
up and died, — blossoming as fair, and smelling 
as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still 
tender, civil, cheerful, lilac colors. 

But this small village, germ of something more, 
why did it fail while Concord keeps its ground ? 
Were there no natural advantages, — no water 



350 WALDEN 

privileges, forsooth ? Ay, the deep Walden Pond 
and cool Brister's Spring, — privilege to drink 
long and healthy draughts at these, all unim- 
proved by these men but to dilute their glass. 
They were universally a thirsty race. Might 
not the basket, stable-broom, mat-making, corn- 
parching, linen-spinning, and pottery business 
have thrived here, making the wilderness to 
blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity 
have inherited the land of their fathers ? The 
sterile soil would at least have been proof against 
a low-land degeneracy. Alas ! how little does 
the memory of these human inhabitants enhance 
the beauty of the landscape ! Again, perhaps, 
Nature will try, with me for a first settler, and 
my house raised last spring to be the oldest in 
the hamlet. 

I am not aware that any man has ever built on 
the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a 
city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose 
materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. 
The soil is blanched and accursed there, and 
before that becomes necessary the earth itself 
will be destroyed. With such reminiscences I 
repeopled the woods and lulled myself asleep. 

At this season I seldom had a visitor. When 
the snow lay deepest no wanderer ventured near 
my house for a week or a fortnight at a time, but 
there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as 



FORMER INHABITANTS 351 

cattle and poultry which are said to have sur- 
vived for a long time buried in drifts, even without 
food; or like that early settler's family in the 
town of Sutton, in this state, whose cottage was 
completely covered by the great snow of 1717 
when he was absent, and an Indian found it only 
by the hole which the chimney's breath made in 
the drift, and so relieved the family. But no 
friendly Indian concerned himself about me ; nor 
needed he, for the master of the house was at 
home. The Great Snow ! How cheerful it is 
to hear of ! When the farmers could not get to 
the woods and swamps with their teams, and 
wxre obliged to cut down the shade trees before 
their houses, and when the crust was harder cut 
off the trees in the swamps ten feet from the 
ground, as it appeared the next spring. 

In the deepest snows, the path which I used 
from the highway to my house, about half a 
mile long, might have been represented by a 
meandering dotted line, with wide intervals be- 
tween the dots. For a week of even weather I 
took exactly the same number of steps, and of 
the same length, coming and going, stepping de- 
liberately and with the precision of a pair of 
dividers in my own deep tracks, — to such rou- 
tine the winter reduces us, — yet often they 
were filled with heaven's own blue. But no 
weather interfered fatally with my walks, or 
rather my going abroad, for I frequently tramped 



352 WALDEN 

eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to 
keep an appointment with a beech tree, or a 
yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the 
pines; when the ice and snow, causing their 
limbs to droop, and so sharpening their tops, 
had changed the pines into fir trees; wading to 
the tops of the highest hills when the snow was 
nearly two feet deep on a level, and shaking 
down another snow-storm on my head at every 
step; or sometimes creeping and floundering 
thither on my hands and knees, when the hunt- 
ers had gone into winter quarters. One after- 
noon I amused myself by watching a barred owl 
{Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of the lower dead 
limbs of a white-pine, close to the trunk, in broad 
daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He 
could hear me when I moved and crouched tlie 
snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. 
When I made most noise he would stretch out his 
neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his 
eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he 
began to nod. I too felt a slumberous influence 
after watching him half an hour, as he sat 
thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged 
brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit 
between their lids, by which he preserved a 
peninsular relation to me; thus, with half-shut 
eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and 
endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote 
that interrupted his visions. At length, on some 




The icy trees 



FORMER INHABITANTS 353 

louder noise or my nearer approach, he would 
grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his 
perch, as if impatient at having his dreams dis- 
turbed; and when he launched himself off and 
flapped through the pines, spreading his wings 
to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the 
slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid 
the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their 
neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twilight 
way as it were with his sensitive pinions, he found 
a new perch, where he might in peace await the 
dawning of his day. 

As I walked over the long causeway made for 
the railroad through the meadows, I encountered 
many a blustering and nipping wind, for no- 
where has it freer play ; and when the frost had 
smitten me on one cheek, heathen as I was, I 
turned to it the other also. Nor was it much bet- 
ter by the carriage road from Brister's Hill. 
For I came to town still, like a friendly Indian, 
when the contents of the broad open fields were 
all piled up between the walls of the Walden 
road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the 
tracks of the last traveller. And when I returned 
new drifts would have formed through which I 
floundered, where the busy northwest wind had 
been depositing the powdery snow round a 
sharp angle in the road, and not a rabbit's track, 
nor even the fine print, the small type, of a 
meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely 

12 



354 WALDEN 

failed to find, even in mid-winter, some warm 
and springy swamp where the grass and the 
skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial ver- 
dure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited 
the return of spring. 

Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I 
returned from my walk at evening I crossed the 
deep tracks of a woodchopper leading from my 
door, and found his pile of whittlings on the 
hearth, and my house filled with the odor of his 
pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to 
be at home, I heard the crouching of the snow 
made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who 
from far through the woods sought my house, to 
have a social ** crack" ; one of the few of his vo- 
cation who are *'men on their farms"; who 
donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and 
is as ready to extract the moral out of church or 
state as to haul a load of manure from his barn- 
yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when 
men sat about large fires in cold bracing weather, 
with clear heads; and when other dessert 
failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which 
wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for 
those which have the thickest shells are com- 
monly empty. 

The one who came from farthest to my lodge, 
through deepest snows and most dismal tem- 
pests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, 
a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; 



FORMER INHABITANTS 355 

but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by 
pure love. Who can predict his comings and 
goings ? His business calls him out at all hours, 
even when doctors sleep. We made that small 
house ring with boisterous mirth and resound 
with the murmur of much sober talk, making 
amends then to Walden vale for the long silences. 
Broadway was still and deserted in comparison. 
At suitable intervals there were regular salutes 
of laughter, which might have been referred in- 
differently to the last-uttered or the forthcoming 
jest. We made many a ''bran new" theory of 
life over a thin dish of gruel, which combined 
the advantages of conviviality with the clear- 
headedness which philosophy requires. 

I should not forget that during my last winter 
at the pond there w^as another welcome visitor, 
who at one time came through the village, through 
snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp 
through the trees, and shared with me some long 
winter evenings. One of the last of the philoso- 
phers, — Connecticut gave him to the world, — 
he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he de- 
clares, his brains. These he peddles still, prompt- 
ing God and disgracing man, bearing for fruit 
his brain only, like the nut its kernel. I think that 
he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. 
His w^ords and attitude always suppose a better 
state of things than other men are acquainted 
with, and he will be the last man to be disap- 



356 WALDEN 

pointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture 
in the present. But though comparatively dis- 
regarded now, when his day comes, laws unsus- 
pected by most will take effect, and masters of 
families and rulers will come to him for advice. — 

"How blind that cannot see serenity!" 

A true friend of man ; almost the only friend of 
human progress. An Old Mortality, say rather 
an Immortality, with unwearied patience and 
faith maldng plain the image engraven in men's 
bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced 
and leaning monuments. With his hospitable 
intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, 
and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, 
adding to it commonly some breadth and ele- 
gance. I think that he should keep a caravansary 
on the world's highway, where philosophers of all 
nations might put up, and on his sign should be 
printed: ''Entertainment for man, but not for 
his beast. Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet 
mind, who earnestly seek the right road." He 
is perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest 
crotchets of any I chance to know; the same 
yesterday and to-morrow. Of yore we had saun- 
tered and talked, and effectually put the world 
behind us ; for he was pledged to no institution 
in it, freeborn, ingenuus. Whichever way we 
turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth 
had met together, since he enhanced the beauty 



FORMER INHABITANTS 357 

of the landscape. A' blue-robed man, whose 
fittest roof is the overarching sky which reflects 
his serenity. I do not see how he can ever die ; 
Nature cannot spare him. 

Having each some shingles of thought well 
dried, we sat and whittled them, trying our knives, 
and admiring the clear yellowish grain of the 
pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and rever- 
ently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the 
fishes of thought were not scared from the stream, 
nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and 
went grandly, like the clouds which float through 
the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks 
which sometimes form and dissolve there. There 
we worked, revising mythology, rounding a fable 
here and there, and building castles in the air 
for which earth offered no worthy foundation. 
Great Looker ! Great Expecter ! to converse 
with whom was a New England Night's Enter- 
tainment. Ah ! such discourse we had, hermit 
and philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken 
of, — we three, — it expanded and racked my 
little house ; I should not dare to say how many 
pounds' weight there was above the atmospheric 
pressure on every circular inch; it opened its 
seams so that they had to be calked with much 
dulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak; 
— but I had enough of that kind of oakum 
already picked. 

There was one other with whom I had "solid 



358 WALDEN 

seasons," long to be remembered, at his house 
in the village, and who looked in upon me from 
time to time; but I had no more for society 
there. 

There too, as everywhere, I sometimes ex- 
pected the Visitor who never comes. The 
Vishnu Purana says, *'The house-holder is to 
remain at eventide in his courtyard as long as it 
takes to milk a cow, or longer if he pleases, to 
await the arrival of a guest." I often performed 
this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to 
milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the 
man approaching from the town. 



XV 

WINTER ANIMALS 

WHEN the ponds were firmly frozen, they 
afforded not only new and shorter routes 
to many points, but new views from their 
surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. 
JVhen I crossed Flint's Pond, after it was covered 
with snow, though I had often paddled about and 
skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so 
strange that I could think of nothing but Baf- 
fin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me 
at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did 
not remember to have stood before; and the 
fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over 
the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish 
dogs, passed for sealers or Esquimaux, or in 
misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, 
and I did not know whether they were giants or 
pygmies. I took this course when I went to lec- 
ture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no 
road and passing no house between my own hut 
and the lecture room. In Goose Pond, which 
lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and 
raised their cabins high above the ice, though 
none could be seen abroad when I crossed it. 



360 WALDEN 

Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, 
or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, 
was my yard, where I could walk freely when the 
snow was nearly two feet deep on a level else- 
where and the villagers were confined to their 
streets. There, far from the village street, and, 
except at very long intervals, from the jingle of 
sleigh-bells, I slid and skated, as in a vast moose- 
yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and 
solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling 
with icicles. 

For sounds in winter nights, and often in 
winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious 
note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a 
sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck 
with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua ver- 
nacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar 
to me at last, though I never saw the bird while 
it was making it. I seldom opened my door in 
a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo 
hoo, hoover hoo, sounded sonorously, and the 
first three syllables accented somewhat like how 
der do; or sometimes hoo hoo only. One night 
in the beginning of winter, before the pond 
froze over, about nine o'clock, I was startled by 
the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to 
the door, heard the sound of their wings like 
a tempest in the woods as they flew low over 
my house. They passed over the pond toward 
Fair-Haven, seemingly deterred from settling 







e) 



WINTER ANIMALS 361 

by my light, their commodore honking all the 
while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmis- 
takable cat-owl from very near me, with the 
most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard 
from any inhabitant of the woods, responded 
at regular intervals to the goose, as if deter- 
mined to expose and disgrace this intruder from 
Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass 
and volume of voice in a native, and boo-hoo him 
out of Concord horizon. What do you mean 
by alarming the citadel at this time of night con- 
secrated to me ? Do you think I am ever caught 
napping at such an hour, and that I have not 
got lungs and a larynx as well as yourself.? 
Boo-hoo, boo-Jioo, boo-hoo I It was one of the 
most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, 
if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it 
the elements of a concord such as these plains 
never saw nor heard. 

I also heard the whooping of the ice in the 
pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Con- 
cord, as if it w^ere restless in its bed and would 
fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency 
and bad dreams; or I was waked by the crack- 
ing of the ground by the frost, as if some one 
had driven a team against my door, and in the 
morning w^ould find a crack in the earth a quarter 
of a mile long and a third of an inch wide. 

Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged 
over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in 



362 WALDEN 

search of a partridge or other game, barking 
raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as 
if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking ex- 
pression, struggling for light and to be dogs 
outright and run freely in the streets; for if 
we take the ages into our account, may there 
not be a civilization going on among brutes as 
well as men ? They seemed to me to be rudi- 
mental, burrowing men, still standing on their 
defence, awaiting their transformation. Some- 
times one came near to my window, attracted 
by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and 
then retreated. 

Usually the red squirrel {Sciurus Hudsonius) 
waked me in the dawn, coursing over the roof 
and up and down the sides of the house, as if 
sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the 
course of the winter I threw out half a bushel 
of ears of sweet-corn, which had not got ripe, 
on to the snow crust by my door, and was 
amused by watching the motions of the various 
animals which were baited by it. In the twilight 
and the night the rabbits came regularly and 
made a hearty meal. All day long the red 
squirrels came and went, and afforded me much 
entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would 
approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, 
running over the snow crust by fits and starts 
like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces 
this way, with wonderful speed and waste of 



WINTER ANIMALS 363 

energy, making inconceivable haste with his 
*' trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as 
many paces that way, but never getting on more 
than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly 
pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gra- 
tuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe 
were fixed on him, — for all the motions of a 
squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of 
the forest, imply spectators as much as those of 
a dancing girl, — wasting more time in delay 
and circumspection than would have suflficed 
to walk the whole distance, — I never saw one 
walk, — and then suddenly, before you could 
say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top 
of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and 
chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing 
and talking to all the universe at the same time, 
— for no reason that I could ever detect, or he 
himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he 
would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable 
ear, brisk about in the same uncertain trigo- 
nometrical way to the topmost stick of my 
wood-pile, before my window, where he looked 
me in the face, and there sit for hours, supply- 
ing himself with a new ear from time to time, 
nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the 
half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew 
more dainty still and played with his food, 
tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the 
ear, which was held balanced over the stick by 



364 WALDEN 

one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell 
to the ground, when he would look over at it 
with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as 
if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not 
made up whether to get it again, or a new one, 
or be off ; now thinking of corn, then listening 
to hear what was in the wind. So the little 
impudent fellow would waste many an ear in 
a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer 
and plumper one, considerably bigger than 
himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set 
out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buf- 
falo, by the same zigzag course and frequent 
pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too 
heavy for him and falling all the while, making 
its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and 
horizontal, being determined to put it through 
at any rate ; — a singularly frivolous and whim- 
sical fellow ; — and so he would get off with it 
to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top 
of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I 
would afterwards find the cobs strewed about 
the woods in various directions. 

At length the jays arrive, whose discordant 
screams were heard long before, as they were 
warily making their approach an eighth of a 
mile off ; and in a stealthy and sneaking manner 
they flit from tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and 
pick up the kernels which the squirrels have 
dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch-pine bough. 



WINTER ANIMALS 365 

they attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel 
which is too big for their throats and chokes 
them; and after great labor they disgorge it, 
and spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it 
by repeated blows with their bills. They were 
manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect 
for them; but the squirrels, though at first shy, 
went to work as if they were taking what was 
their own. 

Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, 
which, picking up the crumbs the squirrels 
had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and, 
placing them under their claws, hammered away 
at them with their little bills, as if it were an 
insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently re- 
duced for their slender throats. A little flock 
of these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out 
of my wood-pile, or the crumbs at my door, 
with faint flitting lisping notes, like the tinkling 
of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day 
day day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a 
wiry summery phe-be from the wood-side. They 
were so familiar that at length one alighted on 
an armful of wood which I was carrying in, and 
pecked at the sticks without fear. I once had 
a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a mo- 
ment while I was hoeing in a village garden, 
and I felt that I w^as more distinguished by that 
circumstance than I should have been by any 
epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels also 



366 WALDEN 

grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasion- 
ally stepped upon my shoe, when that was the 
nearest way. 

Wlien the ground was not yet quite covered, 
and again near the end of winter, when the snow 
was melted on my south hill side and about my 
wood-pile, the partridges came out of the woods 
morning and evening to feed there. Which- 
ever side you walk in the woods the partridge 
bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow 
from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which 
comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden 
dust; for this brave bird is not to be scared by 
winter. It is frequently covered up by drifts, 
and, it is said, ** sometimes plunges from on 
wing into the soft snow, where it remains con- 
cealed for a day or two." I used to start them 
in the open land also, where they had come out 
of the woods at sunset to **bud" the wild apple 
trees. They will come regularly every evening 
to particular trees, where the cunning sports- 
man lies in wait for them, and the distant or- 
chards next the woods suffer thus not a little. 
I am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any 
rate. It is Nature's own bird which lives on 
buds and diet drink. 

In dark winter mornings, or in short winter 
afternoons, I sometimes heard a pack of hounds 
threading all the woods with hounding cry and 
yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase. 



WINTER ANIMALS 367 

and the note of the hunting horn at intervals, 
proving that man was in the rear. The woods 
ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the 
open level of the pond, nor following pack 
pursuing their Actaeon. And perhaps at evening 
I see the hunters returning with a single brush 
trailing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking 
their inn. They tell me that if the fox would 
remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would 
be safe, or if he would run in a straight line 
away no fox-hound could overtake him; but, 
having left his pursuers far behind, he stops to 
rest and listen till they come up, and when he 
runs he circles round to his old haunts, where 
the hunters await him. Sometimes, however, 
he will run upon a wall many rods, and then 
leap off far to one side, and he appears to know 
that water will not retain his scent. A hunter 
told me that he once saw a fox pursued by 
hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice 
was covered with shallow puddles, run part way 
across, and then return to the same shore. Ere- 
long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the 
scent. Sometimes a pack hunting by them- 
selves would pass my door, and circle round my 
house, and yelp and hound without regarding 
me, as if afflicted by a species of madness, so 
that nothing could divert them from the pursuit. 
Thus they circle until they fall upon the recent 
trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake every- 



368 WALDEN 

thing else for this. One day a man came to my 
hut from Lexington to inquire after his hound 
that made a large track, and had been hunting 
for a week by himself. But I fear that he was 
not the wiser for all I told him, for every time 
I attempted to answer his questions he inter- 
rupted me by asking, '*What do you do here.^" 
He had lost a dog, but found a man. 

One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who 
used to come to bathe in Walden once every 
year when the water was warmest, and at such 
times looked in upon me, told me that many 
years ago he took his gun one afternoon and 
went out for a cruise in Walden Wood, and as 
he walked the Wayland road he heard the cry 
of hounds approaching, and erelong a fox 
leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as 
thought leaped the other wall out of the road, 
and his swift bullet had not touched him. Some 
way behind came an old hound and her three 
pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own ac- 
count, and disappeared again in the woods. 
Late in the afternoon, as he was resting in the 
thick woods south of Walden, he heard the 
voice of the hounds far over toward Fair-Haven 
still pursuing the fox; and on they came, their 
hounding cry which made all the woods ring 
sounding nearer and nearer, now from Well- 
Meadow, now from the Baker Farm. For a 
long time he stood still and listened to their 



WINTER ANIMALS 369 

music, so sweet to a hunter's ear, when sud- 
denly the fox appeared, threading the solemn 
aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound 
was concealed by a sympathetic rustle of the 
leaves, swift and still, keeping the ground, leav- 
ing his pursuers far behind; and, leaping upon 
a rock amid the woods, he sat erect and listen- 
ing, with his back to the hunter. For a moment 
compassion restrained the latter's arm; but 
that was a short-lived mood, and as quick as 
thought can follow thought his piece was lev- 
elled, and whang! — the fox rolling over the rock 
lay dead on the ground. The hunter still kept 
his place and listened to the hounds. Still on 
they came, and now the near woods resounded 
through all their aisles with their demoniac 
cry. At length the old hound burst into view 
with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the 
air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock ; 
but spying the dead fox she suddenly ceased 
her hounding, as if struck dumb with amaze- 
ment, and walked round and round him in 
silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, 
like their mother, were sobered into silence by 
the mystery. Then the hunter came forward 
and stood in their midst, and the mystery was 
solved. They waited in silence while he skinned 
the fox, then followed the brush awhile, and at 
length turned off into the woods again. That 
evening a Weston Squire came to the Concord 



370 WALDEN 

hunter's cottage to inquire for his hounds, and 
told how for a week they had been hunting on 
their own account from Weston woods. The 
Concord hunter told him what he knew and 
offered him the skin; but the other declined it 
and departed. He did not find his hounds that 
night, but the next day learned that they had 
crossed the river and put up at a farm-house 
for the night, whence, having been well fed, 
they took their departure early in the morning. 

The hunter who told me this could remember 
one Sam Nutting, who used to hunt bears on 
Fair-Haven Ledges, and exchange their skins 
for rum in Concord village ; who told him, even, 
that he had seen a moose there. Nutting had a 
famous fox-hound named Burgoyne, — he pro- 
nounced it Bugine, — which my informant used 
to borrow. In the *'Wast Book" of an old 
trader of this town, who was also a captain, 
town-clerk, and representative, I find the fol- 
lowing entry: Jan. 18th, 1742-3, "John Melven 
Cr. by 1 Grey Fox 0—2—3;" they are not 
found here; and in his ledger, Feb. 7th, 1743, 
Hezekiah Stratton has credit "by ^ a Catt skin 
— 1 — 4J;" of course a wild-cat, for Strat- 
ton was a sergeant in the old French war, and 
would not have got credit for hunting less 
noble game. Credit is given for deerskins also, 
and they were daily sold. One man still pre- 
serves the horns of the last deer that was killed 



WINTER ANIMALS 371 

in this vicinity, and another has told me the 
particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was 
engaged. The hunters were formerly a numer- 
ous and merry crew here. I remember well 
one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf 
by the road-side and play a strain on it wilder 
and more melodious, if my memory serves me, 
than any hunting horn. 

At midnight, when there was a moon, I some- 
times met with hounds in my path prowling 
about the woods, which would skulk out of my 
way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the 
bushes till I had passed. 

Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my 
store of nuts. There were scores of pitch-pines 
around my house, from one to four inches in 
diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the 
previous winter, — a Norwegian winter for 
them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they 
were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine 
bark with their other diet. These trees were 
alive and apparently flourishing at mid-summer, 
and many of them had grown a foot, though com- 
pletely girdled; but after another winter such 
were without exception dead. It is remark- 
able that a single mouse should thus be allowed 
a whole pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round 
instead of up and down it; but perhaps it is 
necessary in order to thin these trees, which 
are wont to grow up densely. 



372 WALDEN 

The hares (Lepus Americanus) were very 
familiar. One had her. form under my house 
all winter, separated from me only by the floor- 
ing, and she startled me each morning by her 
hasty departure when I began to stir, — thump, 
thump, thump, striking her head against the 
floor timbers in her hurry. They used to come 
round my door at dusk to nibble the potato 
parings which I had thrown out, and were so 
nearly the color of the ground that they could 
hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimes 
in the twilight I alternately lost and recovered 
sight of one sitting motionless under my window. 
When I opened my door in the evening, off they 
would go with a squeak and a bounce. Near at 
hand they only excited my pity. One evening 
one sat by my door two paces from me, at first 
trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a 
poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged 
ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. 
It looked as if Nature no longer contained the 
breed of nobler bloods, but stood on her last 
toes. Its large eyes appeared young and un- 
healthy, almost dropsical. I took a step, and 
lo, away it scudded with an elastic spring over 
the snow crust, straightening its body and its 
limbs into graceful length, and soon put the 
forest between me and itself, — the wild free 
venison, asserting its vigor and the dignity of 
Nature. Not without reason was its slender- 



WINTER ANIMALS 373 

ness. Such then was its nature. {Lepus, levipes, 
lightfoot, some think.) 

Wliat is a country without rabbits and par- 
tridges ? They are among the most simple and 
indigenous animal products; ancient and ven- 
erable families known to antiquity as to mod- 
ern times; of the very hue and substance of 
Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the 
ground, — and to one another ; it is either 
winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had 
seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge 
bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be 
expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and 
the rabbit are still sure to thrive, like true natives 
of the soil, whatever revolutions occur. If the 
forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which 
spring up afford them concealment, and they 
become more numerous than ever. That must 
be a poor country indeed that does not support 
a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and 
around every swamp may be seen the partridge 
or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and 
horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends. 



XVI 

THE POND IN WINTER 



FTER a still winter night I awoke with 



2%^ the impression that some question had 
been put to me, which I had been en- 
deavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as 
what — how — when — where ? But there was 
dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, 
looking in at my broad windows with serene and 
satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I 
awoke to an answered question, to Nature and 
daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth 
dotted with young pines, and the very slope of 
the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to 
say. Forward ! Nature puts no question and 
answers none which we mortals ask. She has 
long ago taken her resolution. ''O Prince, our 
eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit 
to the soul the wonderful and varied spectacle 
of this universe. The night veils without doubt 
a part of this glorious creation; but day comes 
to reveal to us this great work, which extends 
from earth even into the plains of the ether." 

Then to my morning work. First I take an 
axe and pail and go in search of water, if that be 







e 



THE POND IN WINTER 375 

not a dream. After a cold and snowy night it 
needed a divining rod to find it. Every winter 
the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, 
which was so sensitive to every breath, and re- 
flected every light and shadow, becomes solid 
to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that 
it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance 
the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is 
not to be distinguished from any level field. 
Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it 
closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three 
months or more. Standing on the snow-covered 
plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my 
way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot 
of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, 
kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet 
parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light 
as through a window of ground glass, with its 
bright sanded floor the same as in summer; 
there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in 
the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the 
cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. 
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our 
heads. 

Early in the morning, while all things are crisp 
with frost, men come with fishing reels and 
slender lunch, and let down their fine lines 
through the snowy field to take pickerel and 
perch; wild men, who instinctively follow other 
fashions and trust other authorities than their 



376 WALDEN 

townsmen, and by their goings and comings 
stitch towns together in parts where else they 
would be ripped. They sit and eat their lunch- 
eon in stout fear-naughts on the dry oak leaves 
on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the citi- 
zen is in artificial. They never consulted with 
books, and know and can tell much less than 
they have done. The things which they prac- 
tise are said not yet to be known. Here is one 
fishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. 
You look into his pail with wonder as into a 
summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up 
at home, or knew where she had retreated. 
How, pray, did he get these in mid-winter ? Oh, 
he got worms out of rotten logs since the ground 
froze, and so he caught them. His life itself 
passes deeper in Nature than the studies of the 
naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the 
naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark 
gently with his knife in search of insects; the 
former lays open logs to their core with his axe, 
and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets 
his living by barking trees. Such a man has 
some right to fish, and I love to see Nature car- 
ried out in him. The perch swallows the grub- 
worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the 
fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the 
chinks in the scale of being are filled. 

When I strolled around the pond in misty 
weather I was sometimes amused by the primi- 



THE POND IN WINTER 377 

tive mode which some ruder fisherman had 
adopted. He would perhaps have placed alder 
branches over the narrow holes in the ice, which 
were four or five rods apart and an equal dis- 
tance from the shore, and having fastened the 
end of the line to a stick to prevent its being 
pulled through, have passed the slack line over 
a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, 
and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled 
down, would show when he had a bite. These 
alders loomed through the mist at regular in- 
tervals as you walked halfway round the pond. 
Ah, the pickerel of Walden ! when I see them 
lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisher- 
man cuts in the ice, making a little hole to ad- 
mit the water, I am always surprised by their 
rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they 
are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, 
foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They 
possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty 
which separates them by a wide interval from 
the cadaverous cod and haddock whose fame is 
trumpeted in our streets. They are not green 
like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue 
like the sky ; but they have, to my eyes, if pos- 
sible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious 
stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized 
nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They, 
of course, are Walden all over and all through ; 
are themselves small Waldens in the animal 



378 WALDEN 

kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they 
are caught here, — that in this deep and capa- 
cious spring, far beneath the rattHng teams and 
chaises and tinkhng sleighs that travel the Wal- 
den road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. 
I never chanced to see its kind in any market; 
it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. Eas- 
ily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up 
their watery ghosts, like a mortal translated be- 
fore his time to the thin air of heaven. 

As I was desirous to recover the long-lost 
bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully, 
before the ice broke up, early in '46, with com- 
pass and chain and sounding line. There have 
been many stories told about the bottom, or 
rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly 
had no foundation for themselves. It is re- 
markable how long men will believe in the 
bottomlessness of a pond without taking the 
trouble to sound it. I have visited two such 
Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this neighbor- 
hood. Many have believed that Walden reached 
quite through to the other side of the globe. 
Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long 
time, looking down through the illusive medium, 
perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, 
and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of 
catching cold in their breasts, have seen vast 
holes ''into which a load of hay might be driven," 



THE POND IN WINTER 379 

if there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted 
source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal 
Regions from these parts. Others have gone 
down from the village with a "fifty-six" and a 
wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed 
to find any bottom; for while the "fifty-six" 
was resting by the way, they were paying out 
the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their 
truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. 
But I can assure my readers that Walden has 
a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, 
though at an unusual, depth. I fathomed it 
easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing 
about a pound and a half, and could tell accu- 
rately when the stone left the bottom, by having 
to pull so much harder before the water got 
underneath to help me. The greatest depth 
was exactly one hundred and two feet ; to which 
may be added the five feet which it has risen 
since, making one hundred and seven. This is 
a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet 
not an inch of it can be spared by the imagina- 
tion. What if all ponds were shallow ? Would 
it not react on the minds of men ? I am thank- . 
ful that this pond was made deep and pure for 
a symbol. While men believe in the infinite 
some ponds will be thought to be bottomless. 

A factory owner, hearing what depth I had 
found, thought that it could not be true, for, 
judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand 



380 WALDEN 

would not He at so steep an angle. But the 
deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion to 
their area as most suppose, and, if drained, 
would not leave very remarkable valleys. They 
are not like cups between the hills ; for this one, 
which is so unusually deep for its area, appears 
in a vertical section through its centre not 
deeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds, emp- 
tied, would leave a meadow no more hollow 
than we frequently see. William Gilpin, who 
is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, 
and usually so correct, standing at the head of 
Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as 
"a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms 
deep, four miles in breadth," amd about fifty 
miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, 
"If we could have seen it immediately after the 
diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of Nature 
occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what 
a horrid chasm it must have appeared ! 

*'So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low 
Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, 
Capacious bed of waters — " 

But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch 
Fyne, we apply these proportions to Walden, 
which, as we have seen, appears already in a 
vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will 
appear four times as shallow. So much for the 
increased horrors of the chasm of Loch Fyne 
when emptied. No doubt many a smiling 




y 



IValden Pond on a winter morning 



THE POND IN WINTER 381 

valley with its stretching cornfields occupies 
exactly such a *' horrid chasm," from which the 
waters have receded, though it requires the in- 
sight and the far sight of the geologist to con- 
vince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact. 
Often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores 
of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and 
no subsequent elevation of the plain have been 
necessary to conceal their history. But it is 
easiest, as they who work on the highways 
know, to find the hollows by the puddles after a 
shower. The amount of it is, the imagination, 
give it the least license, dives deeper and soars 
higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the 
depth of the ocean will be found to be very in- 
considerable compared with its breadth. 

As I sounded through the ice I could deter- 
mine the shape of the bottom with greater ac- 
curacy than is possible in surveying harbors 
which do not freeze over, and I was surprised 
at its general regularity. In the deepest part 
there are several acres more level than almost 
any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and 
plough. In one instance, on a line arbitrarily 
chosen, the depth did not vary more than one 
foot in thirty rods; and generally, near the 
middle, I could calculate the variation for each 
one hundred feet in any direction beforehand 
within three or four inches. Some are accus- 
tomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes 



382 WALDEN 

even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect 
of water under these circumstances is to level 
all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom 
and its conformity to the shores and the range 
of the neighboring hills were so perfect that a 
distant promontory betrayed itself in the sound- 
ings quite across the pond, and its direction 
could be determined by observing the opposite 
shore. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and 
valley and gorge deep water and channel. 

When I had mapped the pond by the scale of 
ten rods to an inch, and put down the soundings, 
more than a hundred in all, I observed this re- 
markable coincidence. Having noticed that the 
number indicating the greatest depth was ap- 
parently in the centre of the map, I laid a rule 
on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, 
and found, to my surprise, that the line of great- 
est length intersected the line of greatest breadth 
exactly at the point of greatest depth, notwith- 
standing that the middle is so nearly level, the 
outline of the pond far from regular, and the 
extreme length and breadth were got by measur- 
ing into the coves; and I said to myself. Who 
knows but this hint would conduct to the deepest 
part of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle ? 
Is not this the rule also for the height of moun- 
tains, regarded as the opposite of valleys ? We 
know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest 
part. 



THE POND IN WINTER 383 

Of five coves, three, or all which had been 
sounded, were observed to have a bar quite 
across their mouths and deeper water within, so 
that the bay tended to be an expansion of water 
within the land not only horizontally but ver- 
tically, and to form a basin or independent 
pond, the direction of the two capes showing 
the course of the bar. Every harbor on the sea- 
coast, also, has its bar at its entrance. In pro- 
portion as the mouth of the cove was wider com- 
pared with its length, the water over the bar 
was deeper compared with that in the basin. 
Given, then, the length and breadth of the cove, 
and the character of the surrounding shore, 
and you have almost elements enough to make 
out a formula for all cases. 

In order to see how nearly I could guess, with 
this experience, at the deepest point in a pond, 
by observing the outlines of its surface and the 
character of its shores alone, I made a plan of 
White Pond, which contains about forty-one 
acres, and, like this, has no island in it, nor any 
visible inlet or outlet ; and as the line of greatest 
breadth fell very near the line of least breadth, 
where two opposite capes approached each 
other and two opposite bays receded, I ventured 
to mark a point a short distance from the latter 
line, but still on the line of greatest length, as 
the deepest. The deepest part was found to be 
within one hundred feet of this, still farther in 



r>8l WALDEN 

the direction to which I had inclinod, and was 
only one foot deeper, namely sixty feet. Of 
conrse, a stream rnnnin^^ throngh, or an island 
in the pond, wonld make the problem mneh 
more eomplieated. 

If we knew all the laws of Natnre, we shonld 
need only one fact, or the description of one 
actnal phenomenon, to infer all the particnlar 
resnlts at that point. Now we know only a few 
law^s, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, 
by any confusion or irrciiularitv in Nature, but 
by our ignorance of essential elements in the 
calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are 
commonly confined to those instances which we 
detect; l)ut the harmony which results from a 
far a'reater number of seeminoly conflictiuir, but 
really conciu'rine:, laws, which we haye not de- 
tected, is still more wonderful. The particular 
laws are as our points of yiew, as, to the trayel- 
ler, a mountain outline varies with every step, 
and it has an iniinite number of profiles, though 
absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or 
bored through it is not comprehended in its 
entireness. 

What I have observed of the pond is no less 
true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a 
rule of the two diameters not only guides us 
toward the sim in the system and the heart in 
man; but draw lines throuoh the lenirth and 
breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular 



THE POND IN WINTER 385 

daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves 
and inlets, and where they intersect will he the 
height or dej)th of his character. Perhaps we 
need only to know how his shores trend and his 
adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his 
depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded 
by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean 
shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected 
in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding 
depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves 
him shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold 
projecting brow falls off to and indicates a cor- 
responding depth of thought. Also there is a bar 
across the entrance of our every cove, or partic- 
ular inclination ; each is our harbor for a season, 
in which we are detained and partially land- 
locked. These inclinations are not whimsical 
usuallv, but their form, size, and direction are 
determined by the promontories of the shore, 
the ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is 
gradually increased by storms, tides, or currents, 
or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that it 
reaches to the surface, that which was at first 
Ijut an inclination in the shore in which a thought 
was harbored becomes an individual lake, cut 
off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures 
its own conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt 
to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a 
marsh. At the advent of each individual into 
this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has 

13 



386 WALDEN 

risen to the surface somewhere ? It is true, we 
are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for 
the most part, stand off and on upon a harbor- 
less coast, are conversant only with the bights of 
the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of 
entry, and go into the dry docks of science, 
where they merely refit for this world, and no 
natural currents concur to individualize them. 

As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not 
discovered any but rain and snow and evapora- 
tion, though perhaps, with a thermometer and a 
line, such places may be found, for where the 
water flows into the pond it will be probably be 
coldest in summer and warmest in winter. 
When the ice-men were at work here in '46-7, 
the cakes sent to the shore were one day rejected 
by those who were stacking them up there, not 
being thick enough to lie side by side with the 
rest; and the cutters thus discovered that the 
ice over a small space was two or three inches 
thinner than elsewhere, which made them think 
that there was an inlet there. They also showed 
me in another place what they thought was a 
^' leach hole," through which the pond leaked out 
under a hill into a neighboring meadow, pushing 
me out on a cake of ice to see it. It was a small 
cavity under ten feet of water; but I think that 
I can warrant the pond not to need soldering till 
they find a worse leak than that. One has sug- 
gested that if such a *'leach hole" should be 



THE POND IN WINTER 387 

found, its connection with the meadow, if any 
existed, might be proved by conveying some 
colored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the 
hole, and then putting a strainer over the spring 
in the meadow, which would catch some of the 
particles carried through by the current. 

While I was surveying, the ice, which was six- 
teen inches thick, undulated under a slight wind 
like water. It is well known that a level cannot 
be used on ice. At one rod from the shore its 
greatest fluctuation, when observed by means of 
a level on land directed toward a graduated staff 
on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, though 
the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. 
It was probably greater in the middle. Who 
knows but if our instruments were delicate enough 
we might detect an undulation in the crust of the 
earth ? When two legs of my level were on the 
shore and the third on the ice, and the sights 
were directed over the latter, a rise or fall of 
the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made 
a difference of several feet on a tree across the 
pond. When I began to cut holes for sounding, 
there were three or four inches of water on the 
ice under a deep snow which had sunk it thus 
far; but the water began immediately to run 
into these holes, and continued to run for two 
days in deep streams, which wore away the ice 
on every side, and contributed essentially, if not 
mainly, to dry the surface of the pond; for, as 



388 WALDEN 

the water ran in, it raised and floated the ice. 
This was somewhat like cutting a hole in the 
bottom of a ship to let the water out. When such 
holes freeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a 
new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, 
it is beautifully mottled internally by dark fig- 
ures, shaped somewhat like a spider's web, 
what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the 
channels worn by the water flowing from all 
sides to a centre. Sometimes, also, when the 
ice was covered with shallow puddles, I saw a 
double shadow of myself, one standing on the 
head of the other, one on the ice, the other on the 
trees or hill side. 

While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice 
are thick and solid, the prudent landlord comes 
from the village to get ice to cool his summer 
drink; impressively, even pathetically wise, to 
foresee the heat and thirst of July now in Janu- 
ary, — wearing a thick coat and mittens ! when 
so many things are not provided for. It may be 
that he lays up no treasures in this world which 
will cool his summer drink in the next. He cuts 
and saws the solid pond, unroofs the house of 
fishes, and carts off their very element and air, 
held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood, 
through the favoring winter air, to wintry cellars, 
to underlie the summer there. It looks like solid- 
ified azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the 



THE POND IN WINTER 389 

streets. These ice-cutters are a merry race, full 
of jest and sport, and when I went among them 
they were wont to invite me to saw pit-fashion 
with them, I standing underneath. 

In the winter of '46-7 there came a hundred 
men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on 
to our pond one morning, with many car-loads of 
ungainly-looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs, 
drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, 
and each man was armed with a double-pointed 
pike-staff, such as is not described in the New 
England Farmer or the Cultivator. I did not 
know whether they had come to sow a crop of 
winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently 
introduced from Iceland. As I saw no manure, 
I judged that they meant to skim the land, as I 
had done, thinking the soil was deep and had 
lain fallow long enough. They said that a gentle- 
man farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted 
to double his money, which, as I understood, 
amounted to half a million already ; but, in order 
to cover each one of his dollars with another, he 
took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of 
Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter. 
They went to work at once, ploughing, harrow- 
ing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as 
if they were bent on making this a model farm ; 
but when I was looking sharp to see what kind of 
seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of 
fellows by my side suddenly began to hook up the 



390 WALDEN 

virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk, clean 
down to the sand, or rather the water, — for it 
was a very springy soil, — indeed, all the terra 
flrma there was, — and haul it away on sleds, 
and then I guessed that they must be cutting 
peat in a bog. So they came and went every day, 
with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from 
and to some point of the polar regions, as it 
seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. 
But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, 
and a hired man, walking behind his team, 
slipped through a crack in the ground down 
toward Tartarus, and he who was so brave before 
suddenly became but the ninth part of a man, 
almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to 
take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that 
there was some virtue in a stove; or sometimes 
the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a plough- 
share, or a plough got set in the furrow and had 
to be cut out. 

To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with 
Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every 
day to get out the ice. They divided it into 
cakes by methods too well known to require 
description, and these, being sledded to the 
shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice plat- 
form, and raised by grappling irons and block 
and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as 
surely as so many barrels of flour, and there 
placed evenly side by side, and row upon row. 



THE POND IN WINTER 391 

as if they formed the solid base of an obeUsk 
designed to pierce the clouds. They told me 
that in a good day they could get out a thousand 
tons, which was the yield of about one acre. 
Deep ruts and ''cradle holes" were worn in the 
ice, as on terra firma, by the passage of the sleds 
over the same track, and the horses invariably 
ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out 
like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus 
in the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on 
one side and six or seven rods square, putting 
hay between the outside layers to exclude the 
air; for when the wind, though never so cold, 
finds a passage through, it will wear large cavi- 
ties, leaving slight supports or studs only here 
and there, and finally topple it down. At first it 
looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but 
when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay 
into the crevices, and this became covered with 
rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss- 
grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted 
marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we 
see in the almanac, — his shanty, as if he had 
a design to estivate with us. They calculated 
that not twenty-five per cent of this would reach 
its destination, and that two or three per cent 
would be wasted in the cars. However, a still 
greater part of this heap had a different destiny 
from what intended; for, either because the ice 
was found not to keep so well as was expected, 



392 WALDEN 

containing more air than usual, or for some 
other reason, it never got to market. This heap, 
made in the winter of '46-7 and estimated to 
contain ten thousand tons, was finally covered 
with hay and boards ; and though it was unroofed 
the following July, and a part of it carried off, the 
rest remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over 
that summer and the next winter, and was not 
quite melted till September, 1848. Thus the 
pond recovered the greater part. 

Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at 
hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beau- 
tifully blue, and you can easily tell it from the 
white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice 
of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. Sometimes 
one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man's 
sled into the village street, and lies there for a 
week like a great emerald, an object of interest 
to all passers. I have noticed that a portion of 
Walden which in the state of water was green 
will often, when frozen, appear from the same 
point of view blue. So the hollows about this 
pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled 
with a greenish water somewhat like its own, but 
the next day will have frozen blue. Perhaps the 
blue color of water and ice is due to the light and 
air they contain, and the most transparent is the 
bluest. Ice is an interesting subject for con- 
templation. They told me that they had some 
in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old 




Among the pines bordering the pond 



THE POND IN WINTER 393 

which was as good as ever. Why is it that a 
bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen 
remains sweet forever ? It is commonly said that 
this is the difference between the affections and 
the intellect. 

Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window 
a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen, 
with teams and horses and apparently all the im- 
plements of farming, such a picture as we see on 
the first page of the almanac ; and as often as I 
looked out I was reminded of the fable of the 
lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, 
and the like; and now they are all gone, and in 
thirty days more, probably, I shall look from 
the same window on the pure sea-green Walden 
water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, 
and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and 
no traces will appear that a man has ever stood 
there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh 
as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a 
lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, be- 
holding his form reflected in the waves, where 
lately a hundred men securely labored. 

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabi- 
tants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Ma- 
dras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my 
well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the 
stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the 
Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years 
of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with 



S94 WALDEN 

which our modern world and its literature seem 
puny and trivial ; and I doubt if that philosophy 
is not to be referred to a previous state of ex- 
istence, so remote is its sublimity from our con- 
ceptions. I lay down the book and go to my 
well for water, and lo ! there I meet the servant 
of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and 
Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges 
reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree 
with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant 
come to draw water for his master, and our 
buckets as it were grate together in the same 
well. The pure Walden water is mingled with 
the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring 
winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous 
islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes 
the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate 
and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, 
melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is 
landed in ports of which Alexander only heard 
the names. 



XVII 

SPRING 

THE opening of large tracts by the ice- 
cutters commonly causes a pond to break 
up earlier; for the water, agitated by the 
wind, even in cold weather, wears away the sur- 
rounding ice. But such was not the effect on 
Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick 
new garment to take the place of the old. This 
pond never breaks up so soon as the others in 
this neighborhood, on account both of its greater 
depth and its having no stream passing through 
it to melt or wear away the ice. I never knew it 
to open in the course of a winter, not excepting 
that of '52-3, which gave the ponds so severe a 
trial. It commonly opens about the first of April, 
a week or ten days later than Flint's Pond and 
Fair-Haven, beginning to melt on the north side 
and in the shallower parts where it began to 
freeze. It indicates better than any water here- 
abouts the absolute progress of the season, being 
least affected by transient changes of tempera- 
ture. A severe cold of a few days' duration in 
March may very much retard the opening of the 
former ponds, while the temperature of Walden 



396 WALDEN 

increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermome- 
ter thrust into the middle of Walden on the 6th 
of March, 1847, stood at 32°, or freezing point; 
near the shore at 33°; in the middle of Flint's 
Pond, the same day, at 32 J°; at a dozen rods 
from the shore, in shallow water, under ice a foot 
thick, at 36°. This difference of three and a half 
degrees between the temperature of the deep 
water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the 
fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively 
shallow, show why it should break up so much 
sooner than Walden. The ice in the shallowest 
part was at this time several inches thinner than 
in the middle. In mid-winter the middle had 
been the warmest and the ice thinnest there. 
So, also, every one who has waded about the 
shores of a pond in summer must have perceived 
how much warmer the water is close to the shore, 
where only three or four inches deep, than a little 
distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, 
than near the bottom. In spring the sun not 
only exerts an influence through the increased 
temperature of the air and earth, but its heat 
passes through ice a foot or more thick, and is 
reflected from the bottom in shallow water, and 
so also warms the water and melts the under 
side of the ice, at the same time that it is melting 
it more directly above, making it uneven, and 
causing the air bubbles which it contains to ex- 
tend themselves upward and downward until it 



SPRING 397 

is completely honeycombed, and at last disap- 
pears suddenly in a single spring rain. Ice has its 
grain as well as wood, and when a cake begins to 
rot or "comb," that is, assume the appearance of 
honeycomb, whatever may be its position, the air 
cells are at right angles with what was the water 
surface. Wliere there is a rock or a log rising 
near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner, 
and is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected 
heat ; and I have been told that in the experiment 
at Cambridge to freeze water in a shallow wooden 
pond, though the cold air circulated underneath, 
and so had access to both sides, the reflection of 
the sun from the bottom more than counter- 
balanced this advantage. When a warm rain 
in the middle of the winter melts off the snow- 
ice from Walden, and leaves a hard, dark, or 
transparent ice on the middle, there will be a 
strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or 
more wide, about the shores, created by this re- 
flected heat. Also, as I have said, the bubbles 
themselves within the ice operate as burning- 
glasses to melt the ice beneath. 

The phenomena of the year take place every 
day in a pond on a small scale. Every morn- 
ing, generally speaking, the shallow water is 
being warmed more rapidly than the deep, 
though it may not be made so warm after all, 
and every evening it is being cooled more 
rapidly until the morning. The day is an 



398 WALDEN 

epitome of the year. The night is the winter, 
the morning and evening are the spring and fall, 
and the noon is the summer. The cracking 
and booming of the ice indicate a change of 
temperature. One pleasant morning after a 
cold night, February 24th, 1850, having gone 
to Flint's Pond to spend the day, I noticed with 
surprise that when I struck the ice with the 
head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for 
many rods around, or as if I had struck on a 
tight drumhead. The pond began to boom 
about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the 
influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from 
over the hills; it stretched itself and yawned 
like a waking man with a gradually increasing 
tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. 
It look a short siesta at noon, and boomed once 
more toward night, as the sun was withdrawing 
his influence. In the right stage of the weather 
a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. 
But in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, 
and the air also being less elastic, it had com- 
pletely lost its resonance, and probably fishes 
and muskrats could not then have been stunned 
by a blow on it. The fishermen say that the 
*' thundering of the pond" scares the fishes and 
prevents their biting. The pond does not 
thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely 
when to expect its thundering; but though I 
may perceive no difference in the weather, it 



SPRING 399 

does. Who would have suspected so large and 
cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensi- 
tive ? Yet it has its law to which it thunders 
obedience when it should as surely as the buds 
expand in the spring. The earth is all alive 
and covered with papillae. The largest pond is 
as sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule 
of mercury in its tube. 

One attraction in coming to the woods to live 
was that I should have leisure and opportunity 
to see the spring come in. The ice in the pond 
at length begins to be honeycombed, and I can 
set my heel in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and 
warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; 
the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see 
how I shall get through the winter without add- 
ing to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer 
necessary. I am on the alert for the first signs 
of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriv- 
ing bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his 
stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the 
woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. 
On the 13th of March, after I had^ heard the 
bluebird, song-sparrow, and red-wing, the ice 
was still nearly a foot thick. As the weather 
grew warmer, it was not sensibly worn aw^ay by 
the water, nor broken up and floated off as in 
rivers, but, though it was completely melted 
for half a rod in width about the shore, the 



400 WALDEN 

middle was merely honeycombed and saturated 
with water, so that you could put your foot 
through it when six inches thick; but by the 
next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain 
followed by fog, it would have wholly disap- 
peared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. 
One year I went across the middle only five 
days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845 
Walden was first completely open on the 1st of 
April; in '46, the 25th of March; in '47, the 
8th of April; in '51, the 28th of March; in '52, 
the 18th of April; in '53, the 23rd of March; 
in '54, about the 7th of April. 

Every incident connected with the breaking 
up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of 
the weather is particularly interesting to us who 
live in a climate of so great extremes. When 
the warmer days come, they who dwell near 
the river hear the ice crack at night with a 
startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy 
fetters were rent from end to end, and within 
a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alli- 
gator comes out of the mud with quakings of 
the earth. One old man, who has been a close 
observer of Nature, and seems as thoroughly 
wise in regard to all her operations as if she 
had been put upon the stocks when he was a boy, 
and he had helped to lay her keel, — who has 
come to his growth, and can hardly acquire 
more of natural lore if he should live to the age 



SPRING 401 

of Methuselah, — told me, and I was surprised 
to hear him express wonder at any of Nature's 
operations, for I thought that there were no 
secrets between them, that one spring day he 
took his gun and boat, and thought that he 
would have a little sport with the ducks. There 
was ice still on the meadows, but it was all gone 
out of the river, and he dropped down without 
obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to 
Fair-Haven Pond, which he found, unexpect- 
edly, covered for the most part with a firm field 
of ice. It was a warm day, and he was sur- 
prised to see so great a body of ice remaining. 
Not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on the 
north or back side of an island in the pond, and 
then concealed himself in the bushes on the 
south side, to await them. The ice was melted 
for three or four rods from the shore, and there 
was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a 
muddy bottom, such as the ducks love, within, 
and he thought it likely that some would be 
along pretty soon. After he had lain still there 
about an hour he heard a low and seemingly 
very distant sound, but singularly grand and 
impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard, 
gradually swelling and increasing as if it would 
have a universal and memorable ending, a 
sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him all 
at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl 
coming in to settle there, and, seizing his gun. 



402 WALDEN 

he started up in haste and excited ; but he found, 
to his surprise, that the whole body of the ice 
had started while he lay there, and drifted in 
to the shore, and the sound he had heard was 
made by its edge grating on the shore, — at 
first gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at 
length heaving up and scattering its wrecks 
along the island to a considerable height before 
it came to a standstill. 

At length the sun's rays have attained the 
right angle, and warm winds blow up mist and 
rain and melt the snow-banks, and the sun dis- 
persing the mist smiles on a checkered land- 
scape of russet and white smoking with incense, 
through which the traveller picks his way from 
islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand 
tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled 
with the blood of winter which they are bearing 
off. 

Few phenomena gave me more delight than 
to observe the forms which thawing sand and 
clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep 
cut on the railroad through which I passed on 
my way to the village, a phenomenon not very 
common on so large a scale, though the number 
of freshly exposed banks of the right material 
must have been greatly multiplied since rail- 
roads were invented. The material was sand 
of every degree of fineness and of various rich 
colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When 



SPRING 403 

the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a 
thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to 
flow down the slopes Uke lava, sometimes burst- 
ing out through the snow and overflowing it 
where no sand was to be seen before. Innum- 
erable little streams overlap and interlace one 
with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid prod- 
uct, which obeys halfway the law of currents, 
and halfway that of vegetation. As it flow^s 
it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, mak- 
ing heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in 
depth, and resembling, as you look down on 
them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated 
thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded 
of coral, of leopards' paws or birds' feet, of 
brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all 
kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose 
forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a 
sort of architectural foliage more ancient and 
typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or 
any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under 
some circumstances, to become a puzzle to 
future geologists. The whole cut impressed me 
as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open 
to the light. The various shades of the sand are 
singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the 
different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, 
and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches 
the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out 
flatter into strands^ the separate streams losing 



404 WALDEN 

their semi-cylindrical form and gradually be- 
coming more flat and broad, running together 
as they are more moist, till they form an almost 
flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, 
but in which you can trace the original forms 
of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, 
they are converted into hanks, like those formed 
off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vege- 
tation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom. 
The whole bank, which is from twenty to 
forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass 
of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a 
quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the prod- 
uce of one spring day. What makes this sand 
foliage remarkable is its springing into existence 
thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the 
inert bank, — for the sun acts on one side first, 
— and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the 
creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a 
peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the 
Artist who made the world and me — had come 
to where he was still at work, sporting on this 
bank, and with excess of energy strewing his 
fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer 
to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy over- 
flow is something such a foliaceous mass as the 
vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the 
very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. 
No wonder that the earth expresses itself out- 
wardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea in- 



SPRING 405 

wardly. The atoms have already learned this 
law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging 
leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether 
in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick 
lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver 
and lungs and the leaves of fat (XeiySw, labor, 
lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; 
Xofio^;, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and 
many other words), externally a dry thin leaf, 
even as the / and v are a pressed and dried b. 
The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of 
the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed), with a 
liquid I behind it pressing it forward. In globe, 
gib, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capac- 
ity of the throat. The feathers and wings of 
birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, 
also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the 
earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The 
very globe continually transcends and trans- 
lates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. 
Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as 
if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds 
of water plants have impressed on the watery 
mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, 
and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is 
intervening earth, and towns and cities are the 
ova of insects in their axils. 

When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to 
flow, but in the morning the streams will start 
once more and branch and branch again into 



406 WALDEN 

a myriad of others. You here see perchance 
how blood vessels are formed. If you look closely 
you observe that first there pushes forward from 
the thawing mass a stream of softened sand , 
with a drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, 
feeling its way slowly and blindly downward, 
until at last with more heat and moisture, as 
the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in 
its effort to obey the law to which the most 
inert also yields, separates from the latter and 
forms for itself a meandering channel or artery 
within that, in which is seen a little silvery 
stream glancing like lightning from one stage 
of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and ever 
and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is won- 
derful how rapidly 3^et perfectly the sand organizes 
itself as it flows, using the best material its mass 
affords to form the sharp edges of its channel. 
Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious 
matter which the water deposits is perhaps the 
bony system, and in the still finer soil and or- 
ganic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. 
What is man but a mass of thawing clay ? The 
ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. 
The fingers and toes flow to their extent from 
the thawing mass of the body. Who knows 
what the human body would expand and flow 
out to under a more genial heaven ? Is not the 
hand a spreading falm leaf with its lobes and 
veins ? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as 



SPRING 407 

a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the head, 
with its lobe or drop. The lip — labium, from 
labor (?) — laps or lapses from the sides of the 
cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest con- 
gealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still 
larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. 
The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the 
valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the 
cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vege- 
table leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop, 
larger or smaller ; the lobes are the fingers of the 
leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in so many 
directions it tends to flow, and more heat or 
other genial influences would have caused it 
to flow yet farther. 

Thus it seemed that this one hill side illus- 
trated the principle of all the operations of 
Nature. The Maker of this earth but patented 
a leaf. What ChampolUon will decipher this 
hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a 
new leaf at last.^ This phenomenon is more 
exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fer- 
tility of vineyards. True, it is somewhat excre- 
mentitious in its character, and there is no end 
to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if 
the globe were turned wrong side outward ; but 
this suggests at least that Nature has some 
bowels, and there again is mother of humanity. 
This is the frost coming out of the ground ; this 
is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery 



408 WALDEN 

spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. 
I know of nothing more purgative of winter 
fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that 
Earth is still in her swaddling clothes, and 
stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh 
curls spring from the baldest brow. There is 
nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie 
along the bank like the slag of a furnace, show- 
ing that Nature is '*in full blast" within. The 
earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, 
stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, 
to be studied by geologists and antiquaries 
chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, 
which precede flowers and fruit, — not a fossil 
earth, but a living earth; compared with whose 
great central life all animal and vegetable life 
is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our 
exuviae from their graves. You may melt your 
metals and cast them into the most beautiful 
moulds you can; they will never excite me like 
the forms which this molten earth flows out 
into. And not only it, but the institutions 
upon it, are plastic like clay in the hands of the 
potter. 

Ere long, not only on these banks, but on 
every hill and plain and in every hollow, the 
frost comes out of the ground like a dormant 
quadruped from its burrow, and seeks the sea 
with music, or migrates to other climes in 
clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is 



SPRING 409 

more powerful than Thor with his hammer. 
The one melts, the other but breaks in pieces. 

Wlien the ground was partially bare of snow, 
and a few warm days had dried its surface some- 
what, it was pleasant to compare the first tender 
signs of the infant year just peeping forth with 
the stately beauty of the withered vegetation 
which had withstood the winter, — life-ever- 
lasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild 
grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently 
than in summer even, as if their beauty was not 
ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cattails, mul- 
leins, Johnswort, hardback, meadow-sweet, and 
other strong stemmed plants, those unexhausted 
granaries which entertain the earliest birds, — 
decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature 
wears. I am particularly attracted by the arch- 
ing and sheaf-like top of the wool-grass; it 
brings back the summer to our winter memories, 
and is among the forms which art loves to copy, 
and which, in the vegetable kingdom, have the 
same relation to types already in the mind of 
man that astronomy has. It is an antique style 
older than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the 
phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an in- 
expressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We 
are accustomed to hear this king described 
as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the 
gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of 
Summer. 



410 WALDEN 

At the approach of spring the red squirrels 
got under my house, two at a time, directly 
under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and 
kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping 
and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that 
ever were heard ; and when I stamped they only 
chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and re- 
spect in their mad pranks, defying humanity 
to stop them. No you don't — chickaree — 
chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my argu- 
ments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell 
into a strain of invective that was irresistible. 

The first sparrow of spring ! The year be- 
ginning with younger hope than ever ! The 
faint silvery warblings heard over the partially 
bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song- 
sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes 
of winter tinkled as they fell ! What at such a 
time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and 
all written revelations ? The brooks sing carols 
and glees to the spring. The marsh-hawk sail- 
ing low over the meadow is already seeking the 
first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of 
melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dis- 
solves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up 
on the hill sides like a spring fire, — "et primi- 
tus orbitur herba imbribus primoribus evocata," 
— as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to 
greet the returning sun ; not yellow but green is 
the color of its flame ; — the symbol of perpetual 



SPRING 411 

youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, 
streams from the sod into the summer, checked 
indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, 
lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh 
life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes 
out of the ground. It is almost identical with 
that, for in the growing days of June, when the 
rills are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, 
and from year to year the herds drink at this 
perennial green stream, and the mower draws 
from it betimes their winter supply. So our 
human life but dies down to its root, and still 
puts forth its green blade to eternity. 

Walden is melting apace. There is a canal 
two rods wide along the northerly and westerly 
sides, and wider still at the east end. A great 
field of ice has cracked off from the main body. 
I hear a song-sparrow singing from the bushes 
on the shore, — olit, olit, olit, — chip, chip, chip, 
che, char, — che wiss, %oiss, wiss. He too is 
helping to crack it. How handsome the great 
sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answer- 
ing somewhat to those of the shore, but more 
regular ! It is unusually hard, owing to the 
recent severe but transient cold, and all watered 
or waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides 
eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it 
reaches the living surface beyond. It is glori- 
ous to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in 
the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee 



412 WALDEN 

and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes 
within it, and of the sands on its shore, — a 
silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as 
it were all one active fish. Such is the contrast 
between winter and spring. Walden was dead 
and is alive again. But this spring it broke up 
more steadily, as I have said. 

The change from storm and winter to serene 
and mild weather, from dark and sluggish hours 
to bright and elastic ones, is a memorable crisis 
which all things proclaim. It is seemingly in- 
stantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light 
filled my house, though the evening was at hand, 
and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and 
the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I 
looked out the window, and lo ! where yesterday 
was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond 
already calm and full of hope as in a summer eve- 
ning, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, 
though none was visible overhead, as if it had 
intelligence with some remote horizon. I heard 
a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for 
many a thousand years, methought, whose note 
I shall not forget for many a thousand more, — 
the same sweet and powerful song as of yore. O 
the evening robin, at the end of a New England 
summer day ! If I could ever find the twig he 
sits upon! I mean he; I mean the twig. This 
at least is not the Turdus migratorius. The 
pitch-pines and shrub-oaks about my house. 



SPRING 413 

which had so long drooped, suddenly resumed 
their several characters, looked brighter, greener, 
and more erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed 
and restored by the rain. I knew that it would 
not rain any more. You may tell by looking at 
any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood- 
pile, whether its winter is past or not. As it 
grew darker, I was startled by the honking of 
geese flying low over the woods, like weary 
travellers getting in late from southern lakes, 
and indulging at last in unrestrained complaint 
and mutual consolation. Standing at my door, 
I could hear the rush of their wings; when, 
driving toward my house, they suddenly spied 
my light, and with hushed clamor wheeled and 
settled in the pond. So I came in, and shut the 
door, and passed my first spring night in the 
woods. 

In the morning I watched the geese from the 
door through the mist, sailing in the middle of 
the pond, fifty rods off, so large and tumultuous 
that Walden appeared like an artificial pond 
for their amusement. But when I stood on the 
shore they at once rose up with a great flapping 
of wdngs at the signal of their commander, and 
when they had got into rank, circled about over 
my head, twenty-nine of them, and then steered 
straight to Canada, with a regular honk from 
the leader at intervals, trusting to break their 
fast in muddier pools. A '* plump" of ducks 



414 WALDEN 

rose at the same time and took the route to the 
north in the wake ot their noisier cousins. 

For a week I heard the circling groping clangor 
of some solitary goose in the foggy mornings, 
seeking its companion, and still peopling the 
woods with the sound of a larger life than they 
could sustain. In April the pigeons were seen 
again flying express in small flocks, and in due 
time I heard the martins twittering over my 
clearing, though it had not seemed that the 
township contained so many that it could afford 
me any, and I fancied that they were peculiarly 
of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere 
white men came. In almost all climes the tor- 
toise and the frog are among the precursors and 
heralds of this season, and birds fly with song 
and glancing plumage, and plants spring and 
bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight 
oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilib- 
rium of Nature. 

As every season seems best to us in its turn, 
so the coming in of spring is like the creation of 
Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the 
Golden Age. — 

*'Eurus ad Auroram, Nabathacaque regna recessit, 
Persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis." 

*'The East- Wind withdrew to Aurora and the Nabathsean 
kingdom, 
And the Persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays. 



SPRING 415 

Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things, 
The origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed; 
Or the earth being recent and lately sundered from the high 
Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven." 

A single gentle rain makes the grass many 
shades greener. So our prospects brighten on 
the influx of better thoughts. We should be 
blessed if we lived in the present always, and 
took advantage of every accident that befell us, 
like the grass which confesses the influence of 
the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not 
spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past 
opportunities, which we call doing our duty. 
We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In 
a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are for- 
given. Such a day is a truce to vice. While such 
a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may 
return. Through our own recovered innocence 
we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You 
may have known your neighbor yesterday for 
a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and merely 
pitied or despised him, and despaired of the 
world; but the sun shines bright and warm 
this first spring morning, recreating the world, 
and you meet him at some serene work, and see 
how his exhausted and debauched veins ex- 
pand with still joy and bless the new day, feel 
the spring influence with the innocence of in- 
fancy, and all liis faults are forgotten. There is 
not only an atmosphere of good will about him. 



416 WALDEN 

but even a savor of holiness groping for expres- 
sion, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a 
new-born instinct, and for a short hour the south 
hill side echoes to no vulgar jest. You see some 
innocent fair shoots preparing to burst from his 
gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender 
and fresh as the youngest plant. Even he has 
entered into the joy of his Lord. Why the jailer 
does not leave open his prison doors, — why 
the judge does not dismiss his case, — why the 
preacher does not dismiss his congregation ! It 
is because they do not obey the hint which God 
gives them, nor accept the pardon which he 
freely offers to all. 

*'A return to goodness produced each day in 
the tranquil and beneficent breath of the morn- 
ing, causes that in respect to the love of virtue 
and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little 
the primitive nature of man, as the sprouts 
of the forest which has been felled. In like man- 
ner the evil which one does in the interval of 
a day prevents the germs of virtues which began 
to spring up again from developing themselves 
and destroys them. 

"After the germs of virtue have thus been pre- 
vented many times from developing themselves, 
then the beneficent breath of evening does not 
suffice to preserve them. As soon as the breath 
of evening does not suffice longer to preserve 
them, then the nature of man does not dift'er 



SPRING 417 

much from that of the brute. Men seeing the 
nature of this man like that of the brute, think 
that he has never possessed the innate faculty 
of reason. Are those the true and natural senti- 
ments of man.?" 

*'The Golden Age was first created, which without any avenger 
Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude. 
Punishment and fear were not ; nor were threatening words read 
On suspended brass ; nor did the suppliant crowd fear 
The words of their judge ; but were safe without an avenger. 
Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended 
To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world. 
And mortals knew no shores but their own. 



There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm 
Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed." 

On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from 
the bank of the river near the Nine- Acre-Corner 
bridge, standing on the quaking grass and wil- 
low roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a 
singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of 
the sticks which boys play with their fingers, 
when, looking up, I observed a very slight and 
graceful hawk, like a night-hawk, alternately 
soaring like a ripple and tumbling a rod or two 
over and over, showing the underside of its 
wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the 
sun, or like the pearly inside of a shell. This 
sight reminded me of falconry and what noble- 
ness and poetry are associated with that sport. 
The Merlin it seemed to me it mio-ht be called: 

o 
14 



418 WALDEN 

but I care not for its name. It was the most 
ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did not 
simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the 
larger hawks, but it sported with proud reliance 
in the fields of air; mounting again and again 
with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and 
beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, 
and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as 
if it had never set its foot on terra firma. It ap- 
peared to have no companion in the universe, 
— sporting there alone, — and to need none but 
the morning and the ether with which it played. 
It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely 
beneath it. Where was the parent which 
hatched it, its kindred, and its father in the 
heavens ? The tenant of the air, it seemed re- 
lated to the earth but by an egg hatched some- 
time in the crevice of a crag ; — or was its native 
nest made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the 
rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky, and 
lined with some soft midsummer haze caught 
up from earth ? Its eyry now some cliffy cloud. 
Besides this I got a rare mess of golden and 
silver and bright cupreous fishes, which looked 
like a string of jewels. Ah ! I have penetrated 
to those meadows on the morning of many a 
first spring day, jumping from hummock to 
hummock, from willow root to willow root, when 
the wild river valley and the woods were bathed 
in so pure and bright a light as would have 




5s 



SPRING 419 

waked the dead, if they had been slumbering 
in their graves, as some suppose. There needs 
no stronger proof of immortality. All things 
must live in such a light. O Death, where was 
thy sting? O Grave, where was thy victory, 
then ? 

Our village life would stagnate if it were not 
for the unexplored forests and meadows which 
surround it. We need the tonic of wildness, — 
to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern 
and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming 
of the snipe ; to smell the whispering sedge where 
only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds 
her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly 
close to the ground. At the same time that we 
are earnest to explore and learn all things, we 
require that all things be mysterious and unex- 
plorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, 
unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because un- 
fathomable. We can never have enough of 
Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of 
inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, 
the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness 
with its living and its decaying trees, the thun- 
der-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks 
and produces freshets. We need to witness our 
own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing 
freely where we never wane' ^r. We are cheered 
when we observe the vulture feeding on the car- 
rion which disgusts and disheartens us, and de^ 



420 WALDEN 

riving health and strength from the repast. 
There was a dead horse in the hollow by the 
path to my house, which compelled me some- 
times to go out of my way, especially in the 
night when the air was heavy, but the assurance 
it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable 
health of Nature was my compensation for this. 
I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that 
myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and 
suffered to prey on one another; that tender 
organizations can be so serenely squashed out 
of existence like pulp, — tadpoles which herons 
gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in 
the road; and that sometimes it has rained 
flesh and blood ! With the liability to accident, 
we must see how little account is to be made of 
it. The impression made on a wise man is that 
of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous 
after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compas- 
sion is a very untenable ground. It must be 
expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be 
stereotyped. 

Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, 
and other trees, just putting out amidst the pine 
woods around the pond, imparted a brightness 
like sunshine to the landscape, especially in 
cloudy days, as if the sun were breaking through 
mists and shining faintly on the hill sides here 
and there. On the third or fourth of May I saw 
a loon in the pond, and during the first week of 



SPRING 421 

the month I heard the whippoorwill, the brown 
thrasher, the veery, the wood-pewee, chewink, 
and other birds. I had heard the wood-thrush 
long before. The phoebe had already come 
once more and looked in at my door and win- 
dow, to see if my house was cavern-like enough 
for her, sustaining herself on humming wings 
with clinched talons, as if she held by the air, 
while she surveyed the premises. The sulphur- 
like pollen of the pitch-pine soon covered the 
pond and the stones and rotten wood along the 
shore, so that you could have collected a barrel- 
ful. This is the ** sulphur showers" we hear of. 
Even in Calidasa's drama of Sacontala, we read 
of '* rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the 
lotus." And so the seasons went rolling on into 
summer, as one rambles into higher and higher 
grass. 

Thus was my first year's life in the woods 
completed; and the second year was similar to 
it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847. 



XVIII 

CONCLUSION 

TO the sick the doctors wisely recommend 
a change of air and scenery. Thank 
Heaven, here is not all the world. The 
buckeye does not grow in New England, and 
the mocking-bird is rarely heard here. The 
wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we; 
he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon 
in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night 
in a southern bayou. Even the bison to some 
extent keeps pace with the seasons, cropping 
the pastures of the Colorado only till a greener 
and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellow- 
stone. Yet we think that if rail-fences are 
pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our 
farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives 
and our fates decided. If you are chosen town 
clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Terra del 
Fuego this summer: but you may go to the 
land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe 
is wider than our views of it. 

Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel 
of our craft, like curious passengers, and not 
make the voyage like stupid sailors picking 



CONCLUSION 423 

oakum. The other side of the globe is but the 
home of our correspondent. Our voyage is only 
great circle-sailing, and the doctors prescribe 
for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens 
to Southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but 
surely that is not the game he would be after. 
How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he 
could ? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford 
rare sport ; but I trust it would be nobler game 
to shoot one's self. — 

*' Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find 
A thousand regions in your mind 
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be 
Expert in home-cosmography." 

What does Africa, — what does the West 
stand for ? Is not our own interior white on the 
chart ? black though it may prove, like the 
coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the 
Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a North- 
west Passage around this continent, that we 
would find ? Are these the problems which most 
concern mankind ? Is Franklin the only man 
who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest 
to find him ? Does Mr. Grinnell know where 
he himself is ? Be rather the Mungo Park, the 
Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own 
streams and oceans; explore your own higher 
latitudes, — with shiploads of preserved meats 
to support you, if they be necessary; and pile 
the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were pre- 



424 WALDEN 

served meats invented to preserve meat merely ? 
Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents 
and worlds within you, opening new channels, 
not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the 
lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire 
of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left 
by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who 
have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to 
the less. They love the soil which makes their 
graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit 
which may still animate their clay. Patriotism 
is a maggot in their heads. What was the mean- 
ing of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, 
with all its parade and expense, but an indirect 
recognition of the fact that there are continents 
and seas in the moral world, to which every 
man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by 
him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand 
miles through cold and storm and cannibals, 
in a government ship, with five hundred men 
and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the 
private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of 
one's being alone. — 

"Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos. 
Plus habet hie vitse, plus liabet iHe viag.'* 

*'Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians. 
I have more of God, they more of the road.'* 

It is not worth the while to go round the world to 
count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even 



CONCLUSION 425 

till you can do better, and you may perhaps find 
some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the 
inside at last. England and France, Spain and 
Portuo-al, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front 
on this private sea ; but no bark from them has 
ventured out of sight of land, though it is without 
doubt the direct way to India. If you would 
learn to speak all tongues and conform to the 
customs of all nations, if you would travel 
farther than all travellers, be naturalized in all 
climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head 
agamst a stone, even obey the precept of the 
old philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein 
are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the 
defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards 
that run away and enlist. Start now on that 
farthest western way, which does not pause 
at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct 
toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads 
on direct a tangent to this sphere, summer and 
winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, 
and at last earth down too. 

It is said that Mirabeau took to highway rob- 
bery *'to ascertain what degree of resolution was 
necessary in order to place one's self in formal 
opposition to the most sacred laws of society." 
He declared that "a soldier who fights in the 
ranks does not require half so much courage as 
a foot-pad," — "that honor and religion have 
never stood in the way of a well-considered and 



426 WALDEN 

a firm resolve." This was manly, as the world 
goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A 
saner man would have found himself often 
enough ''in formal opposition" to what are 
deemed "the most sacred laws of society," 
through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and 
so have tested his resolution without going out 
of his way. It is not for a man to put himself 
in such an attitude to society, but to maintain 
himself in whatever attitude he find himself 
through obedience to the laws of his being, 
which will never be one of opposition to a just 
government, if he should chance to meet with 
such. 

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went 
there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had 
several more lives to live, and could not spare 
any more time for that one. It is remarkable 
how easily and insensibly we fall into a particu- 
lar route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. 
I had not lived there a week before my feet wore 
a path from my door to the pond-side; and 
though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is 
still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others 
may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep 
it open. The surface of the earth is soft and 
impressible by the feet of men; and so with 
the paths which the mind travels. How worn 
and -dusty, then, must be the highways of the 
world, how deep the ruts of tradition and con- 



CONCLUSION 427 

formity ! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, 
but rather to go before the mast and on the deck 
of the world, for there I could best see the moon- 
light amid the mountains. I do not wish to go 
below now. 

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: 
that if one advances confidently in the direction 
of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life 
which he has imagined, he will meet with a 
success unexpected in common hours. He will 
put some things behind, will pass an invisible 
boundary; new, universal, and more liberal 
laws will begin to establish themselves around 
and within him; or the old laws be expanded, 
and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal 
sense, and he will live with the license of a higher 
order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies 
his life, the laws of the universe will appear less 
complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor 
poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If 
you have built castles in the air, your work need 
not be lost ; that is where they should be. Now 
put the foundations under them. 

It is a ridiculous demand which England and 
America make, that you shall speak so that they 
can understand you. Neither men nor toad- 
stools grow so. As if that were important, and 
there were not enough to understand you with- 
out them. As if Nature could support but one 
order of understandings, could not sustain birds 



428 WALDEN 

as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping 
things, and hush and who, which Bright can 
understand, were the best English. As if there 
were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly 
lest my expression may not be extra-vagant 
enough, may not wander far enough beyond the 
narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to 
be adequate to the truth of which I have been 
convinced. Extravagance! it depends on how 
you are yarded. The migrating buffalo which 
seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not 
extravagant like the cow which kicks over the 
pail, leaps the cowyard fence, and runs after 
her calf, in milking-time. I desire to speak 
somewhere without bounds; like a man in a 
waking moment, to men in their waking mo- 
ments; for I am convinced that I cannot exag- 
gerate enough even to lay the foundation of 
a true expression. Who that has heard a strain 
of music feared then lest he should speak ex- 
travagantly any more forever.? In view of the 
future or possible, we should live quite laxly 
and undefined in front, our outlines dim and 
misty on that side; as our shadows reveal an 
insensible perspiration toward the sun. The 
volatile truth of our words should continually 
betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. 
Their truth is instantly translated; its literal 
monument alone remains. The words which 
express our faith and piety are not definite; yet 



CONCLUSION 429 

they are significant and fragrant like frankin- 
cense to superior natures. 

Why level downward to our dullest perception 
always, and praise that as common sense ? The 
commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, 
which they express by snoring. Sometimes we 
are inclined to class those who are once-and-a- 
half-witted with the half-witted, because we 
appreciate only a third part of their wit. Some 
would find fault with the morning-red, if they 
ever got up early enough. "They pretend," 
as I hear, ''that the verses of Kabir have four 
different senses: illusion, spirit, intellect, and 
the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas;" but in this 
part of the world it is considered a ground for 
complaint if a man's writings admit of more 
than one interpretation. While England en- 
deavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any en- 
deavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so 
much more widely and fatally ? 

I do not suppose that I have attained to ob- 
scurity, but I should be proud if no more fatal 
fault were found with my pages on this score 
than was found with the Walden ice. Southern 
customers objected to its blue color, which is 
the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, 
and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, 
but tastes of weeds. The purity men love is 
like the- mists which envelop the earth, and not 
like the azure ether beyond. 



430 WALDEN 

Some are dinning in our ears that we Ameri- 
cans, and moderns generally, are intellectual 
dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the 
Elizabethan men. But what is that to the pur- 
pose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. 
Shall a man go and hang himself because he 
belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the 
biggest pygmy that he can ? Let every one mind 
his own business, and endeavor to be what he 
was made. 

Why should we be in such desperate haste to 
succeed, and in such desperate enterprises.^ If 
a man does not keep pace with his companions, 
perhaps it is because he hears a different drum- 
mer. Let him step to the music which he hears, 
however measured or far away. It is not im- 
portant that he should mature as soon as an 
apple tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring 
into summer.^ If the condition of things which 
we were made for is not yet, what were any 
reality which we can substitutes^ We will not 
be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with 
pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, 
though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze 
still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if 
the former were not.? 

There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who 
was disposed to strive after perfection. One day 
it came into his mind to make a staff. Having 
considered that in an imperfect work time is 



CONCLUSION 431 

an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does 
not enter, he said to himself. It shall be perfect 
in all respects, though I should do nothing else 
in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest 
for wood, being resolved that it should not be 
made of unsuitable material ; and as he searched 
for and rejected stick after stick, his friends 
gradually deserted him, for they grew old in 
their works and died, but he grew not older by 
a moment. His singleness of purpose and reso- 
lution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, 
without his knowledge, with perennial youth. 
As he made no compromise with Time, Time 
kept out of his way, and only sighed at a dis- 
tance because he could not overcome him. Be- 
fore he had found a stock in all respects suitable 
the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he 
sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Be- 
fore he had given it the proper shape the dynasty 
of the Candahars was at an end, and with the 
point of the stick he wrote the name of the last 
of that race in the sand, and then resumed his 
work. By the time he had smoothed and polished 
the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; 
and ere he had put on the ferule and the head 
adorned with precious stones, Brahma had 
awoke and slumbered many times. But why 
do I stay to mention these things ? When the 
finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly 
expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist 



432 WALDEN 

into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. 
He had made a new system in making a staff, 
a world with full and fair proportions ; in which, 
though the old cities and dynasties had passed 
away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken 
their places. And now he saw by the heap of 
shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and 
his work, the former lapse of time had been an 
illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than 
is required for a single scintillation from the 
brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the 
tinder of a mortal brain. The material was 
pure, and his art was pure; how could the 
result be other than wonderful ? 

No face which we can give to a matter will 
stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone 
wears well. For the most part, we are not where 
we are, but in a false position. Through an 
infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, 
and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two 
cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult 
to get out. In sane moments we regard only 
the facts, the case that is. Say what you have 
to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better 
than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, 
standing on the gallows, was asked if he had 
anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, 
"to remember to make a knot in their thread 
before they take the first stitch." His com- 
panion's prayer is forgotten. 



CONCLUSION 433 

However mean your life is, meet it and live 
it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It 
is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when 
you are richest. The faultfinder will find faults 
even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. 
You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, 
glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting 
sun is reflected from the windows of the alms- 
house as brightly as from the rich man's abode; 
the snow melts before its door as early in the 
spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live 
as contentedly there, and have as cheering 
thoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor 
seem to me often to live the most independent 
lives of any. Maybe they are simply great 
enough to receive without misgiving. Most 
think that they are above being supported by 
the town; but it oftener happens that they are 
not above supporting themselves by dishonest 
means, which should be more disreputable. 
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. 
Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, 
whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; 
return to them. Things do not change; we 
change. Sell your clothes and keep your 
thoughts. God will see that you do not want 
society. If I were confined to a corner of a 
garret all my days, like a spider, the world 
would be just as large to me while I had my 
thoughts about me. The philosopher said: 



434 WALDEN 

"From an army of three divisions one can 
take away its general, and put it in disorder; 
from the man the most abject and vulgar one 
cannot take away his thought." Do not seek 
so anxiously to be developed, to subject your- 
self to many influences to be played on; it is 
all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals 
the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty 
and meanness gather around us, "and lo ! 
creation widens to our view." We are often 
reminded that if there were bestowed on us the 
wealth of Croesus, our aims must still be the 
same, and our means essentially the same. 
Moreover, if you are restricted in your range 
by poverty, if you cannot buy books and news- 
papers, for instance, you are but confined to 
the most significant and vital experiences; you 
are compelled to deal with the material which 
yields the most sugar and the most starch. It 
is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You 
are defended from being a trifler. No man 
loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on 
a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy super- 
fluities only. Money is not required to buy 
one necessary of the soul. 

I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose 
composition was poured a little alloy of bell 
metal. Often, in the repose of my midday, there 
reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from 
without. It is the noise of my contemporaries. 










-Si 






CONCLUSION 435 

My neighbors tell me of their adventures with 
famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities 
they met at the dinner-table ; but I am no more 
interested in such things than in the contents of 
the Daily Times. The interest and the conver- 
sation are about costume and manners chiefly; 
but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. 
They tell me of California and Texas, of England 

and the Indies, of the Hon. Mr. of Georgia 

or of Massachusetts, all transient and fleeting 
phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their 
court-yard like the Mameluke bey. I delight 
to come to my bearings, — not walk in proces- 
sion with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous 
place, but to walk even with the Builder of the 
Universe, if I may, — not to live in this restless, 
nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, 
but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. 
What are men celebrating ? They are all on a 
committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a 
speech from somebody. God is only the presi- 
dent of the day, and Webster is His orator. I 
love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that 
which most strongly and rightfully attracts me; 
— nqt hang by the beam of the scale and try to 
weigh less, — not suppose a case, but take the 
case that is; to travel the only path I can, and 
that on which no power can resist me. It af- 
fords me no satisfaction to commence to spring 
an arch before I have got a solid foundation. 



436 WALDEN 

Let us not play at kittly benders. There is a 
solid bottom everywhere. We read that the 
traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him 
had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. 
But presently the traveller's horse sank in up 
to the girths, and he observed to the boy, "I 
thought you said that this bog had a hard bot- 
tom." ''So it has," answered the latter, "but 
you have not got half way to it yet." So it is 
with the bogs and quicksands of society; but 
he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is 
thought, said, or done at a certain rare coinci- 
dence is good. I would not be one of those who 
will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and 
plastering; such a deed would keep me awake 
nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for 
the furring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive 
a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you 
can wake up in the night and think of your work 
with satisfaction, — a work at which you would 
not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help 
you God, and so only. Every nail driven should 
be as another rivet in the machine of the uni- 
verse, you carrying on the work. 

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give 
me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food 
and wine in abundance, and obsequious attend- 
ance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I 
went away hungry from the inhospitable board. 
The hospitality was as cold as the ices. I 



CONCLUSION 437 

thought that there was no need of ice to freeze 
them. They talked to me of the age of the wine 
and the fame of the vintage; but I thought of 
an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more 
glorious vintage, which they had not got, and 
could not buy. The style, the house and grounds 
and ''entertainment," pass for nothing with me. 
I called on the king, but he made me wait in his 
hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for 
hospitality. There was a man in my neighbor- 
hood who lived in a hollow tree. His manners 
were truly regal. I should have done better had 
I called on him. 

How long shall we sit in our porticos practising 
idle and musty virtues, which any work would 
make impertinent ? As if one were to begin the 
day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe 
his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to 
practise Christian meekness and charity with 
goodness aforethought ! Consider the China 
pride and stagnant self-complacency of man- 
kind. This generation reclines a little to con- 
gratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious 
line; and in Boston and London and Paris and 
Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of 
its progress in art and science and literature with 
satisfaction. There are the Records of the Phil- 
osophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of 
Great Men! It is the good Adam contemplating 
his own virtue. "Yes, we have done great 



438 WALDEN 

deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never 
die," — that is, as long as we can remember them. 
The learned societies and great men of Assyria, 
— where are they ? What youthful philosophers 
and experimentalists we are ! There is not one 
of my readers who has yet lived a whole human 
life. These may be but the spring months in 
the life of the race. If we have had the seven- 
years' itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year 
locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a 
mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most 
have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor 
leaped as many above it. We know not where 
we are. Besides, we are sound asleep nearly 
half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, 
and have an established order on the surface. 
Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious 
spirits ! As I stand over the insect crawling amid 
the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeav- 
oring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask 
myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts 
and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, 
be its benefactor and impart to its race some 
cheering information, I am reminded of the 
greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands 
over me, the human insect. 

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the 
world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I 
need only suggest what kind of sermons are still 
listened to in the most enlightened countries. 



CONCLUSION 439 

There are such words as joy and sorrow, but 
they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a 
nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary 
and mean. We think that we can change our 
clothes only. It is said that the British Empire 
is very large and respectable, and that the United 
States are a first-rate power. We do not believe 
that a tide rises and falls behind every man which 
can float the British Empire like a chip, if he 
should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows 
what sort of seventeen-year locust will next 
come out of the ground ? The government of 
the world I live in was not framed, like that of 
Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the 
wine. 

The life in us is like the water in the river. It 
may rise this year higher than man has ever 
known it, and flood the parched uplands; even 
this may be the eventful year, which will drown 
out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land 
where we dwell. I see far inland the banks 
which the stream anciently washed, before 
science began to record its freshets. Everyone 
has heard the story which has gone the rounds of 
New England, of a strong and beautiful bug 
which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of 
apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's 
kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and 
afterward in Massachusetts, — from an iegg de- 
posited in the living tree many years earlier 



440 WALDEN 

still, as appeared by counting the annual layers 
beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for 
several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of 
an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resur- 
rection and immortality strengthened by hearing 
of this ? Who knows what beautiful and winged 
life, whose egg has been buried for ages under 
many concentric layers of woodenness in the 
dead dry life of society, deposited at the first in 
the alburnum of the green and living tree, which 
has been gradually converted into the semblance 
of its well-seasoned tomb, — heard perchance 
gnawing out now for years by the astonished 
family of man, as they sat round the festive 
board, — may unexpectedly come forth from 
amidst society's most trivial and handselled 
furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at 
last! 

I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize 
all this; but such is the character of that mor- 
row which mere lapse of time can never make to 
dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is 
darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which 
we are awake. There is more day to dawn. 
The sun is but a morning star. 



3i».77-9 



